"Pinchbeck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intuitions, the work of which is always play, are superseded by method, grind, and education by instruction which is only an effort to repair the defects of heredity, for which, at its best, it is vulgar, pinchbeck substitute. The best play is true genius, which always comes thus into the world, and has this way of doing its work, and all the contents of the memory pouches is luggage to be carried rather than the vital strength ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... output is enough to supply the whole planet. We see, too, constantly, how thin is the barrier separating the chief Anglo-Saxon novelists and playwrights from the pasture of the platitudinarian. Jones and Pinero both made their first strikes, not as the artists they undoubtedly are, but as pinchbeck moralists, moaning over the sad fact that girls are seduced. Shaw, a highly dexterous dramaturgist, smothers his dramaturgy in a pifflish iconoclasm that is no more than a disguise for Puritanism. Bennett and Wells, competent novelists, turn easily from the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... people had a veritable mania for declamation and fancy dress. The Russian Countess gave talks on the prisons of Siberia, wearing the headdress and pinchbeck ornaments of a Slav bride; the Aesthete, in his white cassock, gave readings on obscure questions of art and ethics. The widow of India, in the costume of her caste, described the social life of her people at home. The bearded poet, perspiring ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... ring of yours good guinea gole, honey?" asked the mercenary creature, leering at it. "It looks mighty bright and pretty, it does dat! But mebbe its nuffin but pinchbeck, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... to be true goes without saying. I am not likely to offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. Schomberg is an old member of my company. A very subordinate personage in Lord Jim as far back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story of mine published in 1902. Here he appears ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... transparent, over a green satin. It had the effect of sea-water, and her gray hat, with its pale green wreath, framed the golden-gray of her hair. Every one of her few adornments was exquisite—so was her grace as she moved. Daphne's pink-and-black vivacity beside her seemed a pinchbeck thing. ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... David has his harp, or flute, which comes to the same thing. He has a sort of pinchbeck watch; ditto, ring; ditto, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... be Lady Tristram of Blent, you know, Iver. That's none of your pinchbeck. The real thing—though, as I say, young Harry's only got it by the skin ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... Leg had a vast career, It was sung and danced—and to show how near Low Folly to lofty approaches, Down to society's very dregs, The Belles of Wapping wore "Kilmanseggs," And St. Gile's Beaux sported Golden Legs In their pinchbeck ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... instructive as the Marriage of Figaro, for I am told it approaches to those of Mrs. Behn in Spartan delicacy; but I shall see Miss Farren, who, in my poor opinion is the first of all actresses.' Sir Walter Scott admired and praised her warmly. But the pinchbeck sobriety of later times was unable to tolerate her freedom. She was condemned in no small still voice as immoral, loose, scandalous; and writer after writer, leaving her unread, reiterated the charge till it passed into a byword of criticism, and her works ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... with a pain at his heart. Something kept saying over and over again: "Six years ago that girl there ran off with Walter Brooke. Six years ago that apparently level-headed, sensible little person was dazzled by the pinchbeck graces of that epicure in sensations." Miles fully granted his charm, his gentle melancholy, his caressing manner; but with it all Miles felt that he was so plainly "a wrong-'un," so clearly second-rate and untrustworthy—and a nice girl ought to recognise ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... only as such that we are so entitled,—to stipulate for the abolition of slavery, what is there to prevent our exacting further conditions no less essential to our safety and the prosperity of the South? The national unity we have paid so dearly for will turn out a pinchbeck counterfeit, without that sympathy of interests and ideas, that unity of the people, which can spring only from homogeneousness of institutions. The successive advances toward justice which we made during the war, and which looked so difficult and doubtful before they were made, the ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Gazette, that Lord Cowper's pinchbeck principality is allowed. I wonder his Highness does not desire the Pope to make one of his sons a bishop in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... up. The old, one-storied, Spanish houses with walls three feet thick, and built round a courtyard or patio, were much safer. It's only when the Americans try to improve upon the old order of things with their pinchbeck shams and stucco that Providence interferes like this to ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... viscounts." Not only heralds and genealogists, but every one who has the historic sense, must have felt an emotion of regret when the splendid title of twenty-third Baron Dacre was merged by Mr. Speaker Brand in the pinchbeck dignity of ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... clever little ladies, she was sometimes very naughty. When she was good, she was as good as gold, but when she was naughty, she was as naughty as pinchbeck. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... ready to continue our travels, Halicarnassus seceded into the smoking-car, and the engine was shrieking off its inertia, a small boy, laboring under great agitation, hurried in, darted up to me, and, thrusting a pinchbeck ring with a pink glass in it into my face, exclaimed, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Corsican, 25 And Clotho muttered as she span, While crowned lackeys bore the train, Of the pinchbeck Charlemagne: "Sister, stint not length of thread! Sister, stay the scissors dread! 30 On Saint Helen's granite bleak, Hark, the vulture whets his beak!" Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and, Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, 35 ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... the honest wives of the men, but others drunken, swearing, loud-talking creatures—a disgrace to their sex. Quarrelling and fighting and the wildest uproar were taking place; and then there were a number of Jews with pinchbeck watches, and all sorts of trumpery wares, which they were eager to exchange for poor Jack's golden guineas. Some of them went away in the evening, but many more came back the next morning to drive ...
— The Loss of the Royal George • W.H.G. Kingston
... countenance, and an eye as wistful as a dog's. His threadbare clothes, made in the fashion of a dozen years before, had been decently mended in many places. A paste pin in a faded cravat, and a jaunty cane with a pinchbeck top, betrayed that he was still somewhat of a beau. His scant gray hair was tied behind with a piece of black ribbon, and he carried his hat under his arm, after the fashion of Elliston and the Prince Regent, as one sees them in the colored prints of fifty ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... explained to him, too, the pathetic condition of so much of abandoned New England. Sir Basil was thinking more of her last words in the woods than of local color, but he had, while he listened, a fairly definite impression of pinchbeck shops; of shabby awnings slanting in the sunlight over heaps of tumbled fruit and vegetables; of "buggies," slip-shod, with dust-whitened wheels, the long-tailed, long-maned, slightly harnessed horses hitched to posts along ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... several debts here, and am in some danger of imprisonment. Nobody of any consequence comes to see me. My dear daughter is the only thing of value which I still possess. I have just been trying to sell this pinchbeck watch, and though I asked only six sequins, which is half what it is worth, they would not give me more than two. When a man gets unfortunate, everything is ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... county of Barsetshire, which, as all the world knows, is, politically speaking, as true blue a county as any in England. There have been backslidings even here, it is true; but then, in what county have there not been such backslidings? Where, in these pinchbeck days, can we hope to find the old agricultural virtue in all its purity? But, among those backsliders, I regret to say, that men now reckon Lord Lufton. Not that he is a violent Whig, or perhaps that he is a Whig at all. But he jeers and ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... Darrell's accident, lay a pair of pink kid gloves, bordered with lace, and an enormous fan; the latter, when opened, represented the metamorphosis and death of Actaeon. From her stomacher, to which it was attached by a multitude of glittering steel chains, depended an immense turnip-shaped watch, in a pinchbeck case. Her hair was gathered up behind, in a sort of pad, according to the then prevailing mode; and she wore a muslin cap, and pinners with crow-foot edging. A black silk fur-belowed scarf covered her shoulders; ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the Rose of the Mystical Vision, The spirit and soul of the Men of the Future shall rise and be free, They shall hail me with hymning and harping, With eloquent Art and Elysian, - The Singer who sung not but spurned them, The slaves that could sing "Jubilee;" With pinchbeck lyre and tongue, Praising their tyrant sung, They shall fail and shall fade in derision, As wind on the ways ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... comparatively rare women who hate pretence even in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she was not afraid of—could even love, being a searcher after the new and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck eccentricity—Brummagem originalities—gave to her views of the poverty of poor human nature leading her to a ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... trumped up, bogus, scamped, fraudulent, tricky, factitious bastard; surreptitious, illegitimate, contraband, adulterated, sophisticated; unsound, rotten at the core; colorable; disguised; meretricious, tinsel, pinchbeck, plated; catchpenny; Brummagem. artificial, synthetic, ersatz [G.]; simulated &c 544. Adv. under false colors, under the garb of, under cover of; over the left. Phr. keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope [Macbeth]; fronti nulla fides [Lat.]; ah that deceit should ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was there a popular demand to have hell left out of the Bible? Were there any petitions from the people sent up to this self-constituted legislature of pinchbeck ministers, praying to have hell abolished, and "hades" inserted? Not a petition. And what is this hades? Where is it? Nobody knows. They have taken away our orthodox hell, that has stood by us since we first went to Sunday school, ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... woman's eyes and slid along the lids, where she tried vainly to restrain them. Her face had altered too, like her voice, haggard lines suddenly appearing about the eyes and mouth as if they had just been pencilled there: the truth issuing from beneath her pinchbeck simulations, like a tragic mask revealed by the displacement of a ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... aristocracy—they were South Carolina, in fact, as absolutely as Louis XIV. was France. In their hands—but a few score in number—was concentrated about all there was of South Carolina education, wealth, culture, and breeding. They represented a pinchbeck imitation of that regime in France which was happily swept out of existence by the Revolution, and the destruction of which more than compensated for every drop of blood shed in those terrible days. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... thought worthy of her correspondence. She had diligently read every volume of letters, which she could lay hands on, of persons whose performance was at all renowned in this department of literature (foreign ones in translations), and was by way of being an agreeable rattle, albeit of a pinchbeck, provincial genus. Miss Spraggs was much courted by her relations, who were genuinely proud of her local literary reputation. Also, let it be said, that she had the disposal of capital bringing in ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... own renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation of how the spotless Original would have looked upon a woman suffering and transported thus. The poverty of the play faded out; he became almost unaware of the pinchbeck and the fustian of Patullo's invention and its insufferable mixture with the fabric of which every thread was precious beyond imagination. He looked down with tender patience and compassion upon the development of the woman's intrigue ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... about Laramie, ogled the newcomers, laughing, giggling together as young women of any color do, their black hair sleek with oil, their cheeks red with vermilion, their wrists heavy with brass or copper or pinchbeck circlets, their small moccasined feet peeping beneath gaudy calico given them by their white lords. Older squaws, envious but perforce resigned, muttered as their own stern-faced stolid red masters ordered them to keep close. Of the ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... of to-day cherishes the name of the descendant of Cerdic, of Alfred, and of Edward Plantagenet, who wields the sceptre of his country, is utterly unlike the slavish homage offered by the adoring courtiers of Byzantium to the pinchbeck divinity of Zeno Tarasicodissa. ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... some camels stood, and others knelt. There was a group of sober little donkeys with naked, dusky children clambering about them, or sitting astride their rumps, or pulling their tails. Tawny, black-eyed, barefooted maids, arrayed in rags and adorned with brazen armlets and pinchbeck ear-rings, were poising water-jars upon their heads, or drawing water from the well. A flock of sheep stood by, waiting for the shepherds to fill the hollowed stones with water, so that they might drink—stones which, like those that walled the well, were worn ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... things to stand neuter, For silly wards will bring their guardians blame: So when he saw each ancient dame a suitor To make his little wild Asiatic tame, Consulting "the Society for Vice Suppression," Lady Pinchbeck was his choice. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt motto of Philistia—as Philistia then was. For other times other Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once said, "to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Pinchbeck metal was very much used for watch keys, the fob seals remaining in fashion until knee breeches went out. Some of the French keys are extremely decorative, and many cut and polished steel keys are worth collecting. It is said that Switzerland is one of the happy hunting-grounds ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... book-reviews—were the revolt of an escaped angel against the limitations of a journalistic form. But Anatole France happens to be a man of genius, and genius is a justification of any method. In the hands of a pinchbeck Anatole France, how unendurable the review conceived as a causerie would become! Anatole France observes that "all books in general, and even the most admirable, seem to me infinitely less precious for what they contain than for what he who reads puts into them." ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... and ribbons, pencils, pinchbeck jewels and thimbles, scissors and knives, immediately became visible; with many other things which it is not necessary for us to specify. The pedlar called attention to them by pointing admiringly at each, and recommended them by muttering broken English ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... and with extreme neatness had scissored it out and fastened it on the wall—a pleasant change from the cocaine and chocolate-box suggestiveness of the languorous Kirchner type that in 1916 and 1917 lent a pinchbeck Montmartre atmosphere to so many English ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... her lack of cleverness, and liked and admired her none the less. A vision of Patricia arose—a vision of a dainty, shallow, Dresden-china face with a surprising quantity of vivid hair about it. Patricia was beautiful; and Patricia was clever, in her pinchbeck way. But Rudolph Musgrave doubted very much if her mocking eyes now ever softened into that brooding, sacred tenderness he had seen in Anne's eyes; and he likewise questioned if a hurried, happy thrill ran through Patricia's voice when ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... which, if put forth as new, would be neglected. There remain forgeries of which the motives are so complex as to remain for ever obscure. We may generally ascribe them to love of notoriety in the forger; such notoriety as Macpherson won by his dubious pinchbeck Ossian. More difficult still to understand are the forgeries which real scholars have committed or connived at for the purpose of supporting some opinion which they held with earnestness. There is a vein of madness and self-deceit in the character of the man who half- persuades himself ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... in June when they were busy over a lot of small curios, arranging bits of jade, odd silver watches, seals, and pinchbeck rings, in a glass case that had been cleaned and revarnished, the door opened and an old fellow strolled in—an odd-looking old fellow, with snow-white hair and beard, wearing a black sombrero and a shirt cut very low in the neck. But for a pair of kindly eyes, which looked out at ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... worn plain linen collars, no combs, and a woven woolen scarf about her throat; but the imitation fabrics, as well as the "imitation people," had no more part in her life than they had in her husband's, who abhorred all such pinchbeck. Their loves were identical. They loved nature—the trees, best of all, and the river, and the birds. They loved the Anglican Church, they loved the British flag, they loved Queen Victoria, they loved beautiful, dead ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... the extravagant price of ten guineas, and whom, for as many shillings, I have heard sing half-a-dozen at the Opera House; no, but I was curious to see an English Earl [Cowper] who had passed thirty years at Florence, and who is more proud of a pinchbeck principality and a paltry order from Wirtemberg than he was of being a peer of Great Britain when Great Britain was something.' Elsewhere he speaks admiringly of Mrs. Cosway, and describes her reception as a Diet ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... I refer below, is not our only use of Dutch as a contemptuous adjective. We say "Dutch Gold" for pinchbeck, "Dutch Myrtle" for a weed. "I shall talk to you like a Dutch uncle" is another saying, not in this case contemptuous but rather complimentary—signifying "I'll dress you down to some purpose". One piece of slang we share with ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... did not realize the extent of his misfortune. How could he? Fate is always expected to deal its great blows in the grand manner. But our expectations are fustian spangled with pinchbeck; we look for tragedy to be theatrical. Meanwhile, every day before our eyes, fate works on, employing for its instruments the infinitesimal, the ignoble and ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... those Louis Quinze cabinets; and that modern French mantelpiece clock is hideous. You seem to furnish in downright contempt of the women you invite to sit in the room. Lord help the wretched woman playing hostess in such a pinchbeck bric-a-brac shop, if there were one! She 's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his shoulders as he left the room, and returned in three minutes to say that there was no name at all resembling Talboys in the letter rack. There was Brown, and Sanderson, and Pinchbeck; only ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... the shadow of temptation, and feared no evil because of the Madonna vision in his soul, even the Madonnas preferred Lancelot and Tristram to Galahad. It wasn't an easy world for a man who wanted to keep faith with himself. It was a pinchbeck world, of pretence and pull,—that world that lies drowned out there. And yet I believe it was infinitely better than the lost Atlantis, better than the deluged planet of Noah, nobler and finer than the best civilization of which we have ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith |
