"Pinchbeck" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... music, to the grandeur of its glorious fanes, and the solemnity of its stately ritual. She detested the meretricious show, the tinsel gaudiness, the bowing and genuflecting, the candles and the draperies, of Romanism, and of its pinchbeck imitator Ritualism; but I doubt whether she knew any keener pleasure than to sit in one of the carved stalls of Westminster Abbey, listening to the polished sweetness of Dean Stanley's exquisite eloquence; or to the thunder of the organ mingled with the voices ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... opera-glass, which my workers have had made by the optician at the Observatory; also the gold buttons on my new coat, buttons chiselled by the hand of a fairy, for the man who carries a cane worthy of Louis XIV. in the nineteenth century cannot wear ignoble pinchbeck buttons. These are little innocent toys, which make me considered a millionaire. I have created the sect of the 'Cannophiles' in the world of fashion, and every one thinks me utterly frivolous. This amuses me!" Certainly Balzac was not wrong when he ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... deal to her, you see; he had been the one man she trusted. She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere pinchbeck. On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... negation of political rectitude and decency which characterised the period of the Second Empire, a little band of Republicans refused to bow the knee to the new pinchbeck Caesar, "the man," says Freeman, "whose lips uttered the words je le jure and kept the oath by a December massacre." Inspired by Victor Hugo, their fiery poet and seer, whose Chatiments have the passionate intensity ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... on her. If she were driven to tell her secret to any one, had she not better tell it to him? She knew that if she did so, she would be a creature in his hands to be dealt with as he pleased;—but would there not be a certain charm in being so mastered? He was but a pinchbeck lord. She had wit enough to know that; but then she had wit enough also to feel that she herself was but a pinchbeck lady. He would be fit for her, and she for him,—if only he would take her. Since her daydreams first began, she had been longing for a Corsair; and here ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... knitted the Berlin wool-work! how many masculine hearts throbbed more manfully at the appeal of thy crude patriotism! To-day we analyse ruthlessly thy metre, proclaiming it the butterwoman's rank to market, and thy sentiment, which we dub pinchbeck, and we remember that the Union Jack is used only in the Navy; we are deaf to thy inspiration and dumb at thy chorus; we are sceptical as to thy soldier's love: Nancy, we know from realistic poets of the Barrack Room, took up with another young man ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... things right again and clear 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
... 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
... as if it were my merit, of the impression Fausta had made upon the officer, in her quiet, simple, ladylike dress and manner. For myself, I thought that one slip of pretence in my dress or bearing, a scrap of gold or of pinchbeck, would have ruined both of us in our appeal. But, fortunately, I did not disgrace her, and the man looked at her as if he expected her to say "Fourteenth Street." What would ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... 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 novel to the volume of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... 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 of his ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... 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 three ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... this article, we have read "The Spy" a second time; and melancholy indeed was the contrast between the recollections of the boy and the impressions of the man. It was the difference between the theatre by gas-light and the theatre by day-light: the gold was pinchbeck, the gems were glass, the flowers were cambric and colored paper, the goblets were gilded pasteboard. Painfully did the ideal light fade away, and the well-remembered scene stand revealed in disenchanting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... superstition. Liberty, he says, "is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions of numbers, not by their concurring zeal in behalf of equitable government." The hand that can bend Ulysses' bow is certainly not here; and this pinchbeck Montesquieu can best be left in the obscurity into which he has fallen. The Esprit des Lois took twenty years in writing; and it needed the immense researches of men like Savigny before its significance could fully be grasped. Facile popularisers ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... the humbled, and to subdue and tame the proud.' Might not sucn a noble doctrine have detached the Germans a little from their blind devotion to the Hohenzollern-Hollweg conception of the modern pinchbeck German Empire—a predatory state, greedy to gain new territory but incapable of ruling it when gained, scornful of the rights of smaller peoples, oppressing them when subjugated, as she has oppressed Poland ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... good letters to Daniel Blood, Dolores Hoofer, Senator Pinchbeck, Violet Curzon-Meyer, and Julia Pescod, so I ought to get along all ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... Monti di Pieta, schools and orphanages, kept alive in the people of Italy the ideal at least of a religion pure and undefiled before God.[1] In the tottering statue of the Church some true metal might be found between the pinchbeck at the summit and the clay of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Evening Posts' for this portrait, 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 messes ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... I ought to mention a peculiar Banffshire theorist who addressed me in the following words: "Give me an old set of Blackwood in the Kit North days, and I can easily forego your pinchbeck stories and propagandist novels of to-day. I put the most interesting period for reading at sixty years ago, and I think Scott must have known the charm of that number when he gave the alternative title to Waverley. It is pleasant to ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... family of wealth and position. In 1315 Robert and Richard Skynner held the manor of Pinchbeck, near Spalding. {169b} They were also land owners in Hareby and Bolingbroke. Henry Skynner, by will, dated 29th May, 1612, leaves to his daughter Judith, all his copyhold in Harebie, to his brother, Sir Vincent Skynner, Knight, lands in ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... 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 ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... different keys or tones, first, second, and third, by way of concert. In such a city as London these feats could not fail of making some noise. His house was every day crowded, and great interruption given to his business. Among the rest, he was visited by an exhibitor of wonders. Pinchbeck advised him to a public exhibition of his animals at the Haymarket, and even promised, on receiving a moiety, to be concerned in the exhibition. Bisset agreed, but the day before the performance, Pinchbeck declined, and the other was ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... 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 at which representatives ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... underscored. I mean that God, from what we understand to be His nature, could not accord us His protection by weighing the good and the evil in our conduct, and giving or withholding help according to our worthiness. The Universal is too great to be measured and doled in that way. Nothing but our own pinchbeck ideas could ascribe to Him this pettiness. As it is the kind of sliding scale we ourselves adopt, we limit the Divine ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... 'A pinchbeck gentleman, eh!' had been Dave Brainerd's scornful comment upon hearing this. 'The worst set to deal with; I'd rather tackle ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... that means much with some ladies in England; but with most ladies of the Protestant religion in Ireland, it means, one may almost say, the very Father of Mischief himself. In their minds, the pope, with his lady of Babylon, his college of cardinals, and all his community of pinchbeck saints, holds a sort of second head-quarters of his own at Oxford. And there his high priest is supposed to be one wicked infamous Pusey, and his worshippers are wicked infamous Puseyites. Now, Miss Letty Fitzgerald was strong on ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... which the American newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriates in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded game-worn groom; dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the tin-plate stars and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping the pictorial paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for the inevitable scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, works ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... 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 ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... over the parlour, gallery chamber, buttery, and kitchen, and furniture was scanty, but the plate cupboard was well filled.[236] A prosperous yeoman was often comparatively better off than the small squire. Richard Cust, of Pinchbeck in the same county, though his house was small, consisting only of a hall, parlour with chamber over, kitchen with chamber over, brew-house, milne-house (mill-house), and milk-house, was richer in furniture, possessing a folding-table, 4 chairs, 6 cushions, 27 pieces of pewter, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... earldoms, are "thrown into the common sink, which is 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 first ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... it's a queer world, Captain. There is no bitterer hater of the 'common herd' than the snob who has climbed up from it! The snob and the sneak are closely allied, Captain, and men of that stamp have been known to do some pretty ugly things to uphold their pinchbeck dignity, and to keep the tinsel of the present over the cheap gingerbread of ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... the same marvellous self-restraint, the same courtesy and deference and sorrowful pride. Not one has whimpered—but one. And it turned out that she was a Belgian. It's the breed. Spartan mothers were theatrical and pinchbeck ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... the arms of the Duchess Charlotte; and that the drink-soiled broken body, from which she must so often have recoiled in disgust and terror, had been laid out, with the sad mock royalty of a gilt wooden sceptre and pinchbeck crown, in state in the cathedral of Frascati; when, I say, the news reached Paris, this woman, so confident of having been in the right, and who had written so frankly that if she did not hate her husband it was from mere Christian charity and the duty of forgiveness, felt ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... 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
... ready to continue our travels Halicarnassus seceded into the smoking-car, and while 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... dear Jeanne. A gentleman of good appearance, who lives as carefully as an old maid. The world sees him elegant and happy, and its envies his luxury; but this luxury is as deluding as watch-chains made of pinchbeck. You understand now that I cannot seriously ask you to share such ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... that others would find out the same),[632] And rather wished in such 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... some hundreds of visitors, women and children! some of them the honest wives of the men, but others drunken, swearing, loud-talking creatures—a disgrace to their sex. Quarrelling and fighting and the wildest uproar were taking place; and then there were a number of Jews with pinchbeck watches, and all sorts of trumpery wares, which they were eager to exchange for poor Jack's golden guineas. Some of them went away in the evening, but many more came back the next morning to drive their trade, and would have come as long as coin was ...
— The Loss of the Royal George • W.H.G. Kingston
... by the Gazette, that Lord Cowper's pinchbeck principality is allowed. I wonder his Highness does not desire the Pope to make one of his sons ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... schoolfellow of mine, and was fond of imitating my exploits in the water. One day he told some boys that he could swim across Hessle Harbour; but, in making the attempt, he nearly lost his life. I was about forty yards ahead of him, when I heard some boys cry 'Bob Pinchbeck is drowning.' He had gone down thrice, and was quite exhausted when I got to him, and he was saved, as it were, by the skin of his teeth. I feared he might seize me, and, therefore, I did not take hold of him, but pushed him before until he reached ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... if it should not, being formed in fact of that very metal; but, to do this honest creature justice, I believe the knowledge of its real value would not enhance his sense of my father's kindness, supposing it, as he does, to be pinchbeck gilded. He has had a hard task replacing the folios which were used in the barricade, smoothing out the creases and dog's-ears, and repairing the other disasters they have sustained during their service in the fortification. He brought us some pieces of lead and bullets ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... half developed yet, a boldly-set mouth, and his mother's kindly, practical blue eyes. For surely the eyes of practical people are always quite different from those of all others; and not many people are practical, though I never knew anybody who did not think he or she was, except pinchbeck artists, writers, and players, who are sure that since they must be geniuses, it is necessary to be Bohemians in order to show it. The really big ones are always trying to be practical, like Sir Isaac Newton when he ordered a good-sized hole to be cut in his ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... one from my dear little sister, the first I have had from her since I left London. She is a little jewel, and it will be a sin if she is marred in the cutting and polishing, or if she is set in tawdry French pinchbeck, instead of fine, strong, sterling gold. I am sorry to say that the lady Mrs. Jameson recommended as her governess has not been thought sufficiently accomplished to undertake the charge. I regret this the more, as in a letter I have just received ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... 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 in the palace, through the very flower of her ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... to so often accuse others; but more than forty years of revolutionary and public life and experience have taught me to discriminate between deep convictions and assumed ones—to highly venerate the first, and to keep aloof from the second. Gold is gold, and pinchbeck is pinchbeck, in character ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... 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, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he pleases. He can contrive accurately to discern the countenance of every other person, without being visible himself. I need not enlarge to your lordship upon the admirable uses of this machine. I will only add, that my very dear and ever-lamented friend Mr. Pinchbeck, effected before he died an improvement upon it so valuable, that it cannot but preserve his name from that oblivious power, by which common names are devoured. In his lanthorn, the shade, which used to be inseparable, may be taken away at the possessor's pleasure, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... what I would have had it. I felt dissatisfied with Signore Hank, and with myself too, if the truth be told. I had not taken hold of the situation. I had allowed him to impose on me. I suppose you have had the experience, when someone for whom you have no esteem, imposes his pinchbeck personality upon you. Save for the story which this Doctor West of the Hotel Robinson might spin, I would have gone back to the Corydon and forgotten it. I wandered about a good bit, when a bell-hop showed me an unexpected way out, and there was Mister Sachs at the ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... country. Curtis tells us that Lowell's pursuit was literature, but patriotism was his passion. "His love of country was that of a lover for his mistress. He resented the least imputation upon the ideal America, and nothing was finer than his instinctive scorn for the pinchbeck patriotism which brags and boasts and swaggers, insisting that bigness is greatness and vulgarity simplicity, and the will of a ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... again quote the author who was at that time Miss Shields' favorite poet. Miss Shields had not studied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and was mercifully unaware that not to detect the "pinchbeck" in the Lays is the sign of ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... prejudice in his mind to prevent it sinking in. When he reads more of the life of this madman, he will find that all his great plans resulted in his death at the hands of a woman, and instead of admiring this pinchbeck heroism, what will he see in the exploits of this great captain and the schemes of this great statesman but so many steps towards that unlucky tile which was to bring life and schemes ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... in whom he reposed the completest confidence. This traveller had a very pretty turn for the invention of ornamental designs in fgold and precious stones and he was an accomplished draughtsman. In his journeys about the country he carried with him a tray of pinchbeck and of coloured glass, which represented in duplicate a tray of real jewellery and precious stones which was kept under lock and key at the showroom. It happened, whether by accident or design, that the one tray was substituted for the other, the pinchbeck imitations being left in the jeweller's ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... his face. A disgust which he could not entirely conceal crossed his lips. "My dear sir, you can't serve the Lord better than by singing beautiful songs to the weary people of this earth. To wear out a voice like that on pinchbeck hymn tunes is a crime." Then, as if becoming conscious of a neglect of the girl, he added: "Now that you are in the mood, Miss Lambert, you ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Winifred felt differently towards her husband. She was of the 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 depression not un-tinged ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... the little shop over against the 'Plume of Feathers,' where you might have your pick and choice of all sorts of nice and useful things—bacon, brass snuff-boxes, penny ballads, eggs, candles, cheese, tobacco-pipes, pinchbeck buckles for knee and instep, soap, sausages, and who knows ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... which 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 Holland: the reference to the pawnbroker ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... though he sold so well, was no poet, nor, Sir, I fear, was your verse made of the stuff of immortality. Criticism cannot hurt what is truly great; the Cardinal and the Academy left Chimene as fair as ever, and as adorable. It is only pinchbeck that perishes under the acids of satire: gold defies them. Yet I sometimes ask myself, does the existence of popularity like yours justify the malignity of satire, which blesses neither him who gives, nor him who takes? Are poisoned arrows ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... when one means low-priced, than to use the word cheap. What is low-priced, as everybody knows, is often dear, and what is high-priced is often cheap. A diamond necklace might be cheap at ten thousand dollars, and a pinchbeck necklace dear at ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... Montfort. There is no one who appreciates so completely and so highly the old nobility of England as myself. They are a real aristocracy. None of the pinchbeck pedigrees and ormolu titles of the continent. Lord Montfort is, I think, an earl. A splendid title, earl! an English earl; count goes for nothing. The Earl of Montfort! An enthusiastic admirer of mine! The aristocracy of England, especially the old aristocracy, are highly cultivated. Sympathy from ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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. Like the provincial 'grandes seigneurs' of Louis XVI's reign, they were gay, dissipated and ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... despisers will crawl in the dirt before me, and I will feed my hungry heart with their envy. I will have all luxuries, all joys, all enchantments of the spirit, all contentments of the body that man holds dear. I will buy, buy, buy! deference, respect, esteem, worship—every pinchbeck grace of life the market of a trivial world can furnish forth. I have lost much time, and chosen badly heretofore, but let that pass; I was ignorant then, and could but take for best ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... elderly—certainly considerably older—and with f——. Oh, horror and remorse! He writhed with anguish, as a certain recollection crossed him. An immense gulf of time gaped between him and the past. How long was it since he had heard that those pearls were artificial,—that those golden locks were only pinchbeck? A long, long time ago, when he was a boy, an innocent boy. Now he was a man,—quite an old man. He had been bled copiously; he had a little fever; he had had nothing to eat for very many hours; he had a sleeping-draught, and ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... procure it, that the watch shall go and keep time. A watch that will not keep time is an unlawful article for him to depend upon, being tantamount to no watch, whereas he is bound to have a watch. Otherwise, be his watch large or small, gold, silver, or pinchbeck, all this is indifferent, so long as it be a reliable timekeeper. In like manner, we must have a State, we must have a government, and we must have a government that can govern. Monarchy, aristocracy, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... of Anatole France may fairly be classified as 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." That, in a sense, is true. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... many kinds to do his best in all—or in any one. But most of us sooner or later have been in thrall to "Kenelm Chillingly" or thrilled to that masterly horror story, "The House and the Brain." There is pinchbeck with the gold, but the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... gentlemen! was there ever such a poor sneaking scarecrow of an idol as that gaping straw-stuffed inanity you worship, and call honor? It is not Honor; it is but your honor. It is neither gold, nor silver, nor honest copper, but a vile, worthless pinchbeck. It may be, however, for I have not the honor to belong to any of your clubs, that you no longer insult the word by using it at all. It may be you have deposed it, and enthroned another word of less significance to you still. But what the recognized slang of the day may be is nothing—therefore ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... pages of "The Beau's Stratagem." In a sketch by the always coarse satirist Williams, two of these fellows have been decoyed into an infamous house and drugged, and the indignation of the bully and his female assistants is intense when they find that their watches are not even pinchbeck, but only pincushions. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... her fine brown hair piled on her head into an edifice twisted with gauze and feathers that granted her five inches more of height, looked a Roman empress—her fine bust displayed to advantage and sustaining a necklace of stage emeralds set in pinchbeck, which could not be told from the veritable jewels, so closely were they copied for George Anne from her Grace the Duchess of Bridgewater's. Her hoop was very wide, and over it a green satin brocade ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... has a right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other. What are called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor, are generally of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride. Caligula made a horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a sirloin. Wrap yourself up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and Baronet Roastbeef. As for the intrinsic ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... fight their enemies. Surely, surely, if Christian churches laid to heart as they ought these plain words of the Master, they would bring their united influence to bear against that demon of war, and that pinchbeck, spurious glory which is connected with it. 'Blessed are the peacemakers': let us try ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 sneers at ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... Shakespeare's fellow-dramatists will just as surely reveal his powers of discrimination. Lamb was often carried away by a pioneer's fervor and misled persons like Lowell, who, returning to Ford late in life, found "that the greater part of what [he] once took on trust as precious was really paste and pinchbeck," and that as far as the celebrated closing scene in "The Broken Heart" was concerned, Charles Lamb's comment on it was "worth more than all Ford ever wrote."[92] Hazlitt's dispassionate sanity in this instance forms an instructive ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... is not enough. He must get an English expression if the resources of the language will furnish it, which will equal as near as may be the dignity and beauty of the original. He must not give you pewter for silver, or pinchbeck for gold, or mica for diamond. This practice will soon give him ready command of the great riches of his own noble English tongue. It will give a habitual nobility and beauty to his own style. The best word and phrase will come to him spontaneously ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... company of a well-favored man whom fate had placed at her disposal for three whole days. Herself a blue-blooded American, descendant of old Dutch and New England families, she was quite able to discriminate between reality and sham. Mrs. Devar, she was sure, was a pinchbeck aristocrat; Count Edouard Marigny might have sprung from many generations of French gentlemen, but her paid chauffeur was his superior in every respect save one—since, to all appearance, Marigny was rich ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... 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 ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... double-bitted axes of much the same pattern as those with which our forbears hewed through Norman mail caught the light of the polished brass lamps and flashed upon the wainscot, while even an odd cross-cut saw had been skillfully impressed into the scheme of ornamentation. But there was nothing pinchbeck or tawdry about them. Whirled high by sinewy hands, or clenched in hard brown fingers while a steady eye stared down the barrel, that a bridge might span a ravine where no bridge had been, or venison help to cut down the grocery bill and leave the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... Russell Lowell used dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... and at her wits' end at being thus surprised in all the disorder of her lover's apartments, and pale with shame and terror, hid herself behind the bed curtains, while he, who was an officer of dragoons, very much vexed at being mixed up in such a pinchbeck scandal, and at being caught in a silk shirt by these men who were so correctly dressed in frock coats, frowned angrily, and had to restrain himself so as not to fling his ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... destroyed because he found it customary, was solid, true, and beneficial. Much that he thought it desirable to substitute, was visionary, hollow, and pernicious. He lacked the touchstone of mature philosophy, whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold of social usage; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost his hold on common sense, which might have saved him from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm. The positive side of his creed remains precious, not because it was logical, or scientific, or coherent, but because it ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... stuffs 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 ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... sold with this taking name is nothing more than the alloy formerly called Pinchbeck, and made by melting zinc, in a certain proportion, with copper and brass, so as in colour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... statement of the heroic, that is excellent; its sincerity brings its illusion. But a mere imitation of the peasant statement of the heroic, such as Lady Gregory seems to aim at giving us in these sentences, is as pinchbeck and unreal as Macpherson's Ossian. It reaches a grotesque absurdity when at the close of Act II Finn comes back to the door of the tent and, in order to ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... English musical composer, was probably a member of one of the numerous Lincolnshire families of the name who were to be found at Lincoln, Spalding, Pinchbeck, Moulton and Epworth in the 16th century. According to Wood, he was "bred up to musick under Thomas Tallis." He was appointed organist of Lincoln cathedral about 1563, and on the 14th of September 1568 was married at St Margaret in the Close to Ellen or Julian Birley. On the 22nd ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... sprung to the 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
... 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 that carries burdens. Grosswell ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... 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 five ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... giving any character of this young gentleman, content ourselves with describing his dress only to our readers. He wore, then, a pair of white stockings on his legs, and pumps on his feet: his buckles were a large piece of pinchbeck plate, which almost covered his whole foot. His breeches were of red plush, which hardly reached his knees; his waistcoat was a white dimity, richly embroidered with yellow silk, over which he wore a blue plush coat with ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... to him, did as he was bidden. He was very harsh to the poor Captain; but in such a condition a man can hardly expect that people should not be harsh to him. The Captain endeavoured to hold up his head, and to swagger, and to assume an air of pinchbeck respectability. But the attorney would not permit it. He required that the man should own himself to be penniless, a scoundrel, only anxious to be bought; and the Captain at last admitted the facts. ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... 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, after all." ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... only one phase, namely, pharisaism. Zola, even as we know him here in Riverina, has this advantage, that he gives you no rest for the sole of your foot—or rather, for the foot of your soul; whilst Holmes serenely seduces you to his own pinchbeck standard. Zola is honest; he never calls evil, good; whilst Holmes is spurious all through. Mind you, each has a genuine literary merit ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... feed the Hungry Bum She plays the Girl Philanthropist — Each pinchbeck, boy Millenium She swings, a Bangle, at her wrist — Blithe Parrot and Pert Egoist, You threaten her with Night and Sorrow? Hermiones will aye persist! More Little Groups will ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... of fantastical taxation, levying tolls upon the bare necessities of life, and drying up the founts of national well-being at their sources; the devil of petty-princedom, wallowing in sloth and cruelty upon a pinchbeck throne; the devil of effeminate hidalgoism, ruinous in expenditure, mean and grasping, corrupt in private life, in public ostentatious, vain of titles, cringing to its masters, arrogant to its inferiors. In their train these ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... nothing less than a pound of chalk before him, he commenced polishing up a steel chain that might on an emergency have served to chain up a very large bull-dog; but the Squire adapted it to the more fashionable use of adorning himself, and making safe his ponderous pinchbeck watch. Belhash now puffed, and blowed, and swore, and sweated, and piled on the chalk, and rubbed and tugged criss-crass his knee, until, with the motion and fritting, he had well nigh covered his cloth with the white substance, from the knee downward. Getting it to ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... for a long weary time. Coggan carried an old pinchbeck repeater which he had inherited from some genius in his family; and it now struck one. He lighted another match, and examined ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... lodgings and workshops, no small sum was requisite for the purchase of different kinds of tools—a lathe, an anvil, crucibles, dies, graving-implements, steel pins, hammers, chisels, tongs, scissors, &c.; and also for the purchase of brass and pinchbeck ware, copper, silver, lead, quicksilver, varnish, brimstone, borax, and other things indispensable for labour. He had also taken, without premium, an apprentice, the child of very poor people, to help him. He would have been very glad to put the rest of his money out to interest again; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... 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 ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... sits, Our Lady of Sorrows, upon a rock, in her widow's weeds, exhibiting a grief so intense that she may well have been made larger than life, in order to support a misery which would crush a mortal woman. It is so fine, this emblem of divine suffering, that it obscures its tawdry surroundings, its pinchbeck tabernacle, gilding and red paint. When she is carried in a paso, as whiles she is, no spangled robe is put over her, no priest's vestment, no crown or veil. Seven swords are driven into her bosom: she is unconscious of them. Her wounds are within; ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... everywhere—rhetoric, bombast, commonplaces, flowers of college eloquence, poetry after the style of Latin verses. The poets of this school are eloquent after the manner of stage princes and princesses, always sure of finding in the costumer's labelled cases, cloaks and pinchbeck crowns, which have no other disadvantage than that of having been used by everybody. If these poets never turn the leaves of the Bible, it is not because they have not a bulky book of their own, the Dictionnaire de rimes. That is the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... another, and know not whither! They inflame one another, and know not why! They tinkle with their pinchbeck, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche |
