"Rigmarole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and a tinkling cymbal." nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin[obs3], platitude, niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock [U.S.]; stuff, stuff and nonsense; bosh, rubbish, moonshine, wish-wash, fiddle-faddle; absurdity &c. 497; vagueness &c. (unintelligibility) 519. [routine or reflexive statements ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... he took me for a Jacobite, for he began a rigmarole about loyalty and hard fortune. I hastened to correct him, and he took the correction with the same patient despair with which he took all things. 'Twas but another of ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... I asked. "What object have you in all this"—rigmarole, I was about to say, but regard for his feelings changed it into ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... one would suppose that all this discussion of the physical conditions of existence on the various planets might have been passed over without detriment to the argument. After these efforts at proving (for M. Figuier presumably regards this rigmarole as proof) that all the members of our solar system are habitable, the interplanetary ether is forthwith peopled thickly with "souls," without any resort to argument. This, we suppose, is one of those scientific truths which as M. Figuier tells us, precede and underlie demonstration. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... art a bard completely imbued With genius not to be controlled, Be thou not untractable Within the court of thy king; Until thy rigmarole shall be known, Be thou silent, Heinin, As to the name of thy verse, And the name of thy vaunting; And as to the name of thy grandsire Prior to his being baptized. And the name of the sphere, And the name of ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... prevision is seldom wrong." And kissing her hand, Khalid falters, "Forgiveness is for the sinner, and the good are for forgiveness." Whereupon, they plunge again into the Unseen, and thence to Bohemia. The aftermath, however, does not come up to the expectations of the good Medium. For the rigmarole of the Enchantress about the Dervish in New York had already done its evil work. And—double—double—wherever the Dervish goes. Especially in Bohemia, where many of its daughters set their ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... guess 't he won't find the joke 's fine 's he did at first.' But she was too used up to know when she was havin' good common-sense talked to her; she jus' kep' wipin' her eyes, 'n' then Mrs. Sperrit drove up 'n' the whole rigmarole had to be gone over again for her. I mus' say that she behaved kind of un-neighborly, f'r she laughed fit to kill herself, 'n' Mrs. Craig was nigh to put out over such doin's,—'n' the cat not dead a week yet; but when Mrs. Sperrit got through laughin' she made up f'r it all, for she ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... successively, as a grocer's wife upon a party of pleasure with her eldest apprentice—as an old woman carrying her grandson to school—and as a young strapping Irishman, conveying an ancient maiden to Dr. Rigmarole's, at Redriffe, who buckles beggars for a tester and a dram of Geneva. All this abuse was retorted in a similar strain of humour by Greenjacket and his companion, who maintained the war of wit with the same alacrity with which ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... in this inflated rigmarole that is not adequately expressed in my amended statement, what is it? As to eloquence it will hardly be argued that nonsense, falsehood and metaphors which were old when Rome was young are essential to that. The first man (in early Greece) ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... rigmarole which appealed to Master Boltay most strongly was that this worthy woman had eaten no food that day. So he considered it his Christian duty to there and then take a plate of lard-dumplings and a tumbler full of wine from a ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... replied Sancho, "that this Merlin, or those enchanters who enchanted the whole crew your worship says you saw and discoursed with down there, stuffed your imagination or your mind with all this rigmarole you have been treating us to, and all ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and they were baith rank Episcopawlians. I found the mither had just sae muckle a year frae some o' her far-awa relations; and had it no been that they happened to ca' me Stuart, and I tauld her a rigmarole about my grandfaither and Culloden, so that she soon made me out a pedigree, about which I kenned nae mair than the man o' the moon, but keept saying 'yes' and 'certainly' to a' she said—I say, but for that, and confound me, if she wadna ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... the tipsy philosopher without understanding one word of his rigmarole; only Monsieur Tudesco struck him as a strange and alarming personage, and taller by a hundred feet than anybody he had ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... must be going now," chimed in Fidge, jumping up eagerly, for all this rigmarole had been ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... and the preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen, sounded, I could not help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had declared that the Republic would fall if it did not become instantly naturalistic; he would not, he could not pass over in silence so important a branch of literature as poetry, no matter how contemptible he might think it. If ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... replied Harry, "if he ever did get anything right through this rigmarole and hanky-panky it was simply because he had ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Philopatris, which is the work of an author of the fourth century, Critias is introduced pale and wild. His friend asks him if he has seen Cerberus or Hecate; and he answers that he has heard a rigmarole from certain "thrice-cursed sophists"; which he thinks would drive him mad if he heard it again, and was nearly sending him headlong over some cliff as it was. He retires for relief with his inquirer to a pleasant place, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... a brief discussion here. The children could not understand about the pistol; but only one of them cared what had become of it. For Phillida it was enough to know that the writer of this shameless rigmarole, with its pompous periods and its callous gusto, must long ago have lost his reason. She had no doubt whatever about that, and already it had brought a new light into her eyes. She would pause to discuss nothing else. It was her ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... Balder, seating himself on the side of my bed, although I forestalled his intention, and left hardly an inch for him to sit on. Then he entered into a long and not very lucid rigmarole on souls which are destined to come together. The story was rendered all the more difficult to understand from the fact that I kept falling asleep, and dreaming between his rhapsodies; but I gathered that ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... down on his knees so near my father, that, not knowing what he might do, I rushed between them, and hastily pushed back the arm-chair to the wall. Then the monk, speaking in a mournful tone, which was rendered still more terrifying by the approach of night, began to pour out some lamentable rigmarole of a confession, and ended by asking pardon for his crimes, and declaring that he was already covered by the black veil which parricides wear when ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... worth the somewhat arduous mount to get to it. The peasant girl who stands inside the door, and in a sing-song voice that never varies mixes up saints, fathers, towns, corn, potatoes, bells, and "quelque chose pour le gardien," in her rigmarole, was the least attractive ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... cannot enumerate; neither, indeed, need I, for they were of the kind which even to the present day form the style of popular harangues and patriotic orations, and may be classed in rhetoric under the general title of Rigmarole. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... "What a rigmarole!" whispered Dick, while the Executioner stretched out the Dodo's effigy on the ground, and, resuming his hideous black mask, made ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... the greatest of Biblical scholars, wrote in his journal, on the threshold of manhood: "I am not myself a believer in impossibilities: I think that all the fine stories about natural ability, etc., are mere rigmarole, and that every man may, according to his opportunities and industry, render himself almost anything he ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... on cool period, I trust to such facts as yours (and others) about seeds of the same species from mountains and plains having acquired a slightly different climatal constitution. I know all that I have said will excite in you savage contempt towards me. Do not answer this rigmarole, but attack me to your heart's content, and to that of mine, whenever you can come here, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... long time he continued talking to himself, talked of how he had brought 'the frigate' safely to harbour, and how he had been awarded a 'gold medal' by the king. We could hear only anppets of this long rigmarole, but we never lost the drift of it. He spoke alternately in Danish and Icelandic, in many different tones of voice, and one could always tell, by the way he spoke, where he was in 'the frigate': whether he was addressing the crew on the deck, or the officers on the bridge, and when, his ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... true? Go ahead and let me have all the facts. She is Hare Sahib's daughter; Ali told me that. Precious rigmarole of some sort. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... "Oh, the rigmarole the old family seer came out with before they burned him for an unpalatable prediction at the time of the '15. He was very much vexed about it, of course, and he just prophesied any nonsense of a disagreeable nature that came into his head. You know what these crofter fellows are—ungrateful, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... with my eye in search of some large bird, and was confounded when finally I discovered who the musician really was. Here, every day, were to be heard the glorious song of the cardinal grosbeak, the insect-like effort of the blue-gray gnatcatcher, and the rigmarole of the yellow-breasted chat. On a wooded hillside, where grew a profusion of trailing arbutus, pink azalea, and bird-foot violets, the rowdyish, great-crested flycatchers were screaming in the tree-tops. In this same grove I twice saw the rare red-bellied ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... purposeless took more and more hold upon him. Often, after studying earnestly for a day or two, and making extracts for his book, he would ask himself, "Why take all this trouble? Who is going to be made wiser or happier by this rigmarole?" and his pleasure in the work was gone again for days. The consciousness of exile, instead of being blunted by time, weighed ever more heavily upon him. He never realized till now what an absolute necessity it was to his nature to lean upon a kindred spirit, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... I say?" cried Sallie, as Fred ended his rigmarole, in which he had jumbled together pell-mell nautical phrases and facts out of one of his favorite books. "Well, they went to the bottom, and a nice mermaid welcomed them, but was much grieved on finding the box of ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... if they had, they learn that power, patronage and pay are reserved for us and our friends. Well then like practical men, they look to some result, and they get it. They are asked out to dinner more than they would be; they move rigmarole resolutions at nonsensical public meetings; and they get invited with their women to assemblies at their leader's where they see stars and blue ribbons, and above all, us, whom they little think in appearing on such occasions, make the greatest conceivable sacrifice. ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... many British Embassies and in the British Foreign Office there were nearly always men, permanent officials or else special appointees, who quite successfully discounted the prevailing war mind. They discarded the rigmarole of being pro and con, of having favorite nationalities, and pet aversions, and undelivered perorations in their bosoms. They left that to the political chiefs. But in an American Embassy I once heard an ambassador say that he never ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the rigmarole, the salutes; I could begin a duel, par exemple. It's the other man who ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... "An extraordinary rigmarole altogether!" Meeting Merriton's astonished eyes with his own keen ones, he went on: "The flames, of course, are a plant of some sort. That goes without saying. But the thing to find out is what they're there for to hide. When you've discovered that, ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... straight to Cap Martin, expecting to find Mary. Instead I found my brother and his wife alone. My sister-in-law, I must say in justice, seemed terribly grieved at what had happened. She could or would tell me nothing. But Angelo—my brother—began some rigmarole about Mary having run away from her convent-school years ago with a man, and—but I won't repeat the story. I refused to listen. I can never forgive ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... gained the Acquaintance of Mr. Gozzleton.' So funny! And the exhaustive treatise on the Sources of Light, in the Scientific Saturday. And think of the fuss they make about Homer, a blind old person who wrote a long rigmarole of a poem about battles, and wrote it so badly that to this day no one knows whether it's one complete poem, or a lot of odds-and-ends in the way of poetry, put together by a man with an unpronounceable Greek name. When I think of what Valentine accomplishes in comparison to Homer, ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... it. For it actually came to pass that a very well- known man of letters, while he, with the refined politeness characteristic of his style, spoke of mine as "rigmarole," still ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Jean-Christophe's grandfather expressed his gratitude profusely; he replied with such extraordinary eulogy that, in spite of his adoration of Hassler, the boy was ashamed. But to Hassler they seemed to be pleasant and in the rational order. Finally, the old man, who had lost himself in his rigmarole, took Jean-Christophe by the hand, and presented him to Hassler. Hassler smiled at Jean-Christophe, and carelessly patted his head, and when he learned that the boy liked his music, and had not slept for several nights ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... it from you, depend on it," said the other. "And I think you are very well out of your other partnership. That worthy, Altamont and his daughter correspond, I hear," Pen added after a pause "Yes; she wrote him the longest rigmarole letters that I used to read: the sly little devil; and he answered under cover to Mrs. Bonner. He was for carrying her off the first day or two, and nothing would content him but having back his child. But she didn't want to come, as you may fancy; and he was not very eager about it." Here ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... poet replied. "Death or Foedora! On with you! That silky Foedora deceived you. Women are all daughters of Eve. There is nothing dramatic about that rigmarole of yours." ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... all of that. He went through the rigmarole wearily but without any sense of surprise. The one thing he hadn't been expecting was the man who was waiting for him on the other ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... and the aged chairman step on to the platform; and, amidst the profoundest gloom, the latter rises to pronounce the prefatory rigmarole. "Archaeology," he says, in a voice of brass, "is a science which bars its doors to all but the most erudite; for, to the layman who has not been vouchsafed the opportunity of studying the dusty volumes of the learned, the bones ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... said, "the reason I call her a dreadful old woman is that she's told you all this rigmarole. It makes me quite hot. She sha'n't amuse herself by taking you in like that. I ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... ceremonious rigmarole, in which the Admiral was asked for his autograph, and it was wonderful how well the shrewd little Malay interpreter expressed to the Admiral, who cheerfully agreed to the proposal, and desired me to send for his writing-case. As I rose, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... I know her quite well. She was here with a friend of mine, who asked me to attend her professionally—I mean in my professional capacity. Oh! nothing serious, but we had to communicate with her people and I know all about her. She is not a normal woman. Of course, that rigmarole about the cardinal is all nonsense. She is the daughter of a fisherman of Siracusa. She did dance here once for a few nights, but only at the Biondo, and no one noticed her, she was in one of the back rows of the ballet. Did they tell you why ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... rigmarole in all my born days." And then, angrily to Rachel, "Go down and look on th' top ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... more rigmarole on you, because of an obstinate conviction in my inside that dear Mother was right in the idea that it is the learned—not the ignorant—who wonder, and that the ploughman feels no wonder at all in the glory of the rising sun—though ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... come—white man, Spaniard, say you kill us—ah, no, no—you very good—we very happy—yes, massa, Peter Pongo very happy now." Such was Peter's brief account of himself. You will not consider it too much of a rigmarole. I was, I know, much interested when he told it me, and I had some little difficulty in making out what he meant. Soon after this we entered the magnificent harbour of Rio de Janeiro, which looks ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... the very first assertions made by Iago. In the opening scene he tells his dupe Roderigo that three great men of Venice went to Othello and begged him to make Iago his lieutenant; that Othello, out of pride and obstinacy, refused; that in refusing he talked a deal of military rigmarole, and ended by declaring (falsely, we are to understand) that he had already filled up the vacancy; that Cassio, whom he chose, had absolutely no practical knowledge of war, nothing but bookish theoric, mere prattle, arithmetic, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... she has fulfilled the purpose for which she came into existence, and women—the average Society women, at least—do not. Then there'll be singing, of a sort, and—but you know, Colonel, all the usual rigmarole. Now I want a long, long talk with you about the subject you have just broached. We could not talk, as we would, in the crowd that will be in the drawing-room presently, so I wonder if you would give me an hour in the library, tomorrow morning ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... old man, but he apparently meant just what he said. "All right, Mother," he said finally. "How in hell do I marry her without any rigmarole?" ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... islander, speaking no English and about fifty words of Samoan, recently promoted from the bush work, and a most good, anxious, timid lad of 15 or 16 - looks like 17 or 18, of course - they grow fast here. In comes Mitaiele to Lloyd, and told some rigmarole about Paatalise (the steward's name) wanting to go and see his family in the bush. - 'But he has no family in the bush,' said Lloyd. 'No,' said Mitaiele. They went to the boy's bed (they sleep in the walled-in compartment of the verandah, once my dressing-room) and called at once for me. ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his pipes, chanted forth, in a bold and musical voice, a rude rigmarole called "The Royal Blackbird," which, although of no intrinsic merit, yet, as it expressed sentiments hostile to British connection and British government and favourable to the house of Stewart, was very popular amongst the Catholic peasantry of Ireland, whilst, on the ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... his child, and truckle to her, by backing her up in whims that were against her good, and making light of right and wrong, as if they turned on money; but Mary (such a prudent lass, although she was a fool just now) must see through all such shallow tricks, such rigmarole about Parson Beloe, who must be an idiot himself to think so much of Simon Popplewell—for Easter offerings, no doubt—but there, if Mary had the heart to go away, what use to stand maundering about it? Stephen Anerley ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... will be pancakes, a lunch . . . you'll get your cab-fare. Come along, dear chap. You spout out some rigmarole like a regular Cicero at the grave and what gratitude ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Freeman give his vote without bribes? Let us rather honour the poor man that he does discern clearly wherein lies, for him, the true kernel of the matter. What is it to the ragged grimy Freeman of a Tenpound-Franchise Borough, whether Aristides Rigmarole Esq. of the Destructive, or the Hon. Alcides Dolittle of the Conservative Party be sent to Parliament;—much more, whether the two-thousandth part of them be sent, for that is the amount of his faculty ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Having heard the rigmarole from beginning to end, and from end to beginning, and then from middle to middle again, and gathered therefrom that he to whom she owed her dear boy's life was wounded, Mrs. Reynolds sent Bushie with word to Burl ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... sanctioned, countenanced, and patronized—incited, ordered, and directed, the aforesaid Lampooner—a reckless, heartless, illiterate, evil-minded ghost, yes my friends an evil-spirit, created by the wrath of God—to pour out the rigmarole effusions of his silly and contemptible lucubrations. It is a well-known fact, that this vile calumniator is the shame, the disgrace, the opprobrium, and brand of detestation; the sacrilegious and perjured outcast of society, who would cut ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... readers exclaim, "But where's poetry—the dickens—in all this rigmarole?" We confess we can find none—we can find nothing but a set purpose to be obscure, and an idiot captivity to the jingle of Hudibrastic rhyme. This idle weakness really appears to be at the bottom of half the daring nonsense in this most daringly nonsensical book. Hudibras Butler told us long ago ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... rigmarole that somebody hands you when you've won the Wooden Cross and a little garden growing over your tummy,' is the way they put it in their argot. 'The Marseillaise, the Chant du Depart are all right for the youngsters, ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... quaint rigmarole, he sits watching them till their heads finally sink below the sea of grass, the rheas feathers in Caspar's high crowned hat being the last to disappear, as it were waving back defiance and to ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... followed the usual rigmarole about "his own family," and "hard times," and "diminished resources," and all those stereotype commonplaces which are for ever on the lips of stereotype insincere people. Mr. Clifford did not perceive the dry and somewhat scornful inuendo, ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... precisely defined, and the social life of the foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the unassuming, practical-minded young engineer of the high title and social position who was terribly bored—as he is today—by social rigmarole, and who was thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he always seems to be thinking," was glad to be out of all this as ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians—and how many more?—who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... I said in confusion, recalling all the highfalutin rigmarole which Americans believed—(little martyred Belgium protected by the allies from the inroads of the aggressor, etc.)—"why should the French put machine guns ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... as a stage financier, paused here to gasp; for the utterance of this string of banalities, this rigmarole of commonplaces, had left him breathless. He was very much dissatisfied with his performance; and ready to curse his barren imagination. He longed to hit upon swelling phrases and natural and touching gestures, but in vain. He could only look at Mademoiselle ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... A rigmarole so cleverly told was easily believed by the fool of a wolf, who descended by his greater weight, which not only took him down, but brought the ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... "Pooh! Alma. That rigmarole is not in the guide books. Come, Dixon is waving his handkerchief down there, as a signal that luncheon ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... came home that night he was knocked pretty nigh off his pins to find his sister waitin' for him. He commenced a long rigmarole about where he'd been, but Hannah didn't ask no questions. She said that Washington was mighty fine, but home and Kenelm was good enough for her. Said the thoughts of him alone had been with her every minute, and she just HAD to cut the trip short. Kenelm ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... there's time to change the spooney simplicity, and come out in something spicy, with a dash of the Bloomer. But, maybe, there's some news of him in the other sheet, now she has delivered her conscience of her rigmarole. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pulling or rather tugging off her mask viciously, as she spoke. "Hang me if I didn't think so all the time!" she exclaimed with a sudden change of tactics. "That Jasper's a thief. I heard you say something about those deeds, and Jasper told me a long rigmarole that you wouldn't sign them. Whether that's true or not, Heaven only knows. Jasper's a bad one, an' he's sold me. He's got the coin, and I'll split on him, as I threatened. No, it's no use your trying to make me hush up, I will speak out. I'll show you what ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... rigmarole again. I suppose, when the fit comes on, he will telephone to headquarters for some sort of absent treatment. What charms me is the way those fellows seem to turn on the same tap, whatever the disease. A child down in Oak Street fell into boiling ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... necessary to bring home to some people that this is the twentieth century, not the nineteenth, and I think I've done it. And anyway what are you going to do about it? Did you seriously suppose that I—I—was going through all the orange-blossom rigmarole, voice that breathed o'er Eden, fully choral, red carpet on the pavement, flowers, photographers, vicar, vestry, Daily Picture, reception, congratulations, rice, old shoes, going-away dress, 'Be kind to her, Ozzie.' Not ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... last work, the Quarterly Review observes, "Johnson's name is made the peg on which to hang up—or rather the line on which to hang out—much hackneyed sentimentality, and some borrowed learning, with an awful and overpowering quantity of twaddle and rigmarole." The writer concludes his reviewal: "We are sorry to have had to make such an exposure of a man, who, apart from the morbid excess of vanity which has evidently led him into this scrape, may be, for aught we know, worthy and amiable. His exposure, however, is on his own head: he has ostentatiously ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... said Clapp. "What's the good of studying Latin and Greek, and all that rigmarole? It won't ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... already wearied three generations of readers. At times his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety—with a true heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he was dreamy he would shove his scratch back from his forehead and shut his eyes and recite Homer or Virgil by the page together, while Lancelot and I listened open-mouthed, and I wondered what pleasure he got out of all that rigmarole. The heroes of Homer and of Virgil seemed to me very bloodless, boneless creatures after my kings and wizards out of Mr. Galland's book; even Ulysses, who was a thrifty, shifty fellow enough, with ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... (dilapidated), crone, crook, croon, cross-grained, cross-patch, cross purposes, cuddle, to cuff (to strike), cleft, din, earnest money, egg on, greenhorn, jack-of-all-trades, loophole, settled, ornate, to quail, ragamuffin, riff-raff, rigmarole, scant, seedy, out of sorts, stale, tardy, trash. How Halliwell ever came to class these words as archaic I cannot imagine; but I submit that any one who sets forth to write about the English of England ought ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... confidence in the zeal and public spirit of parliament, and the power and resources of the nation. His majesty's declarations concerning his conduct towards Spain were fully borne out by the manifesto, which was a loose rigmarole, in which scarcely anything else was clear than that war with Great Britain was fully resolved upon. The opposition in both houses took credit to themselves for having prognosticated, in the spirit of true prophets, a war with Spain, and taunted ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... speaking in riddles, Lisle; and if there is one thing I hate, it is riddles. When a fellow begins to talk in that way, I always change the subject. Why a man should try to puzzle his brain, with such rigmarole things, is more than I ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... at the White House, which seemed to have been "edited" by the President himself—as often royalty revises plays—for his special entertainment, the Cabinet being invited, after a rigmarole of stilted phrases purporting to be by Washington, Franklin, Napoleon, and other past celebrities, Mr. Welles, secretary of the navy, remarked: "I will think this matter over, and see what conclusion to arrive at!" ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... the French would say, are coming down the stairs. Our after-dinner oratory, that sounded so telling as we delivered it before the looking-glass, falls strangely flat amidst the clinking of the glasses. The passionate torrent of words we meant to pour into her ear becomes a halting rigmarole, at which—small blame ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... looked here and there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a thicket, and muttering to himself, "There ain't no speckerlation there." And when the way became altogether inscrutable,—"Waal, this is a reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole." As some one remarked, "The dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the potter." "A petrifaction was a kind of a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that she would without fail do it and taking leave of him, returned to her house; whilst the scholar, rejoiced for that himseemed his desire was like to have effect, made an image with certain talismanic characters of his own devising, and wrote a rigmarole of his fashion, by way of conjuration; the which, whenas it seemed to him time, he despatched to the lady and sent to tell her that she must that very night, without more tarriance, do that which he had enjoined her; after which he secretly betook himself, with a servant of ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... turning over to a fresh page he came upon a passage in the life of one of the Elect who was mourning for his mother, excusing him in this solemn rigmarole: "After granting to the feelings of nature such relief as grace cannot forbid on ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... gracefully introduced without unnecessary palaver or reference to family antecedents—the simple name given without a long rigmarole of dazzling titles or senseless adjectives. The Muse is neither pathetically invoked nor anathematically abused, but the author proceeds at once to describe his hero's present situation, which, it strangely appears, is in "a corner." The indefiniteness of the locality—a corner—is not of ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... book of infidel rigmarole, The Races of Men, was lately reprinted by an American house which was never before and we trust will never again be guilty of such an indiscretion,—we understand is coming to New-York to lecture upon Ethnology. He has the "gift" of talking, and is said ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... and evils really undergone. And as I reflect upon what I have written, and try to imagine it read by some brisk person utterly content with life, I can well understand that the whole thing would appear to him incredible, too preposterously strange for belief, a rigmarole of sick fancies beyond the power of hellebore. So be it: I expect small comprehension and no mercy, for indeed I have written caring little for such consequence, yielding to that human thirst for utterance which only confession can slake; ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed he cries,—"Drop it, drop it,—cover it up, cover it up,—pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... 'No rigmarole!' she said, sharply. 'Do you confess you put it there or do you not—reptile?' Her ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... his mother-in-law's curses. Not that he ever saw her again: his wife and eldest son tracked him to Breslau, but only in quest of ducats and divorce: the latter of which Maimon conceded after a legal rigmarole. But he took no advantage of his freedom. A home of his own he never possessed, save an occasional garret where he worked at an unsteady table—one leg usually supported by a folio volume—surrounded by the cats and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... said he, "was makin' shoes in Montopolis when I come here goin' on fifteen year ago. I guess whiskey's his trouble. Once a month he gets off the track, and stays so a week. He's got a rigmarole somethin' about his bein' a Jew pedler that he tells ev'rybody. Nobody won't listen to him any more. When he's sober he ain't sich a fool—he's got a sight of books in the back room of his shop that he reads. I guess you can lay all ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... said irritably. "What is the good of all this rigmarole? Pardon me. All is now clear, and we acknowledge the truth of your main point. Why go into these tedious details? You wish perhaps to boast of the cleverness of your investigation, to cry up your talents ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... before long;—and still Otto's Brother was refused as successor. Brother, however, again survived; behaved always wisely; and Otto at last had his way. "Makes an excellent Archbishop, after all!" said the Magdeburgers. Those were rare times, Mr. Rigmarole. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... "Get off some rigmarole of your own, I tell you," laughed the coming bridegroom, speaking to his companion, "It's no matter what it is, only don't make me burst out laughing in the middle of it, for Estella might resent it. She's ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... knows what rigmarole I've treated her to!" They had parted an hour ago; since when, he believed, ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... the Napo, our travellers had an opportunity of visiting some of these old missionary establishments; and observing the odd rigmarole of superstitions there practised under the guise, and in the name of religion—a queer commingling of pagan rites with Christian ceremonies—not unlike those Buddhistic forms from which these same ceremonies ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... I did the girl no Harm, beyond whispering a little soft nonsense in her ear now and then. But she must needs have a succession of Hysterical Fits after my departure from the Tower, and write me many scores of Letters couched in the most Lamentable Rigmarole, threatening to throw herself into Rosamond's Pond in St. James's Park (then a favourite Drowning-Place for Disconsolate Lovers), with many other nonsensical Menaces. But I was firm to my Determination ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... Monson," he continued, after a very beautiful specimen of rigmarole in the way of love-making, a rigmarole that might have very fairly figured in an editor's law and logic, after he had been beaten in a libel suit, "I think, Miss Monson, you cannot have overlooked the VERY particular attentions I have endeavored to pay you, ever since I have been so fortunate as ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... (to the Captain). I declare the creature has been listening to all this rigmarole, instead of attending to me. Do you ever expect forgiveness? But now that they are all talking together, and you cannot make out a word they say, nor they hear a word that we say, I will describe the company ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... whereof the first was the old nursery jingle—"Mud won't daub sieve, sieve won't hold water, water won't wet stone, stone won't edge axe, axe won't cut rod, rod won't make a gad, a gad to hang Manachar who has eaten my raspberries every one." (So ran the rigmarole with which Mrs. Nance had beguiled my infancy.) The second refrain echoed poor Nat's cry, "She needs help, needs help, and you could not see! Blind, blind, ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... weakness, his mother was much in the habit of playing upon it, as the only means of persuasion or dissuasion within her command which was likely to make any impression upon his knotty young rind. So, while she was spinning out her rigmarole, Sprigg was making a great show of amusing himself with Pow-wow, slapping him over the muzzle with his coonskin cap, or setting that ornament in divers ways on the old dog's head; now with the tail over the right ear, then over the left, or over ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... and bowing to the old chief who was squatting on his hams by his side, in a most polite way, observed—"All this rigmarole, which this old red-skin here has been telling to us, comes to this, as far as I can make out. He has heard the plot of those thieving, varmint red-skins through his wife, or some friend or other. When ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... and read it. It was a long, wordy, ill-written rigmarole, in which that amorous gentleman spoke with much rapture of his love and devotion for Miss Gresham; but at the same time declared, and most positively swore, that the adverse cruelty of his circumstances was such, that it would not allow him to stand up like a man at the hymeneal altar ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... no!' said Volnay. 'The trick isn't done yet, old fellow. You've got to be formally enlisted, and to answer a rigmarole of questions, and be examined by the regimental doctor, and to take the oath. The trick isn't done yet, ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child's rigmarole,—Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as Bose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... doubt they came to one accurate enough, in the end. But all this rigmarole is what people call testing a thing by "internal evidence." The Record insists upon the truth of the story because of certain facts—because "the initials of the young men must be sufficient to establish ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... a tone of disappointed reproach, with apparent pity] Tell me, Etchepare, do you take the jurymen for idiots? [Silence] So that's all you've been able to think of? I said you were intelligent just now. I take that back. But think what you've told me—a rigmarole like that. Why, a child of eight would have done better. It's ridiculous I tell you—ridiculous. The jurymen will simply shrug their shoulders when they hear it. A whole night out of doors, in the pouring rain, to look for a horse you don't find—and without ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... Particular attention should be paid to the transmutation of Antony's funeral oration into French alexandrines. In Voltaire's version, the climax of the speech is reached in the following passage; it is an excellent sample of the fatuity of the whole of his concocted rigmarole:— ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... SMALL? Rubbish! You pay me altogether too much and what I give you to eat isn't worth half of it. But there, I didn't mean to go into all this at all. What I told you all this long rigmarole for was to see if you could think of any way for me to turn those Development Company shares of mine into money. Not what father paid for them, of course, or even half of it. But SOME money at least. If I thought they weren't worth anything ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... an insignificant person, you see,' he went on mischievously. 'You are of so little use to your generation. People do not benefit by your example, or defer to your opinion. There is no St. Ursula in the calendar.' Now what did he mean by all this rigmarole? But he only laughed again in a provoking way, and ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... "None of those people would pull such a trick, Harlan—any more than the ones like you and Arv and Hank who are above suspicion. Most of them could have easily obtained the news without going through such a rigmarole." ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... Christianity ought to have protected him from such gross insults as are poured upon him in this pamphlet. Of the author's literary talent, we shall say but little: the phrases, "setting down to count the cost"—"the rights of the man the greatest bore in nature"—the appellation of rigmarole ramble, given to a correct sentence of Dr. Priestley—which the author attempts to criticise—may serve as ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... is a mystic act: it has in it some flavor of the unknown, some sense of moving into a new moment, a new pattern of the human rigmarole. It includes the highest glimpses of mortal gladness: reunions, reconciliations, the bliss of lovers long parted. Even in sadness, the opening of a door may bring relief: it changes and redistributes human ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... with infallible decrees laid down ex cathedra, and accepted without question by the poor humble public? I tell you, sir, that I have a brain of my own and that I should feel myself to be a snob and a slave if I did not use it. If it pleases you to believe this rigmarole about ether and Fraunhofer's lines upon the spectrum, do so by all means, but do not ask one who is older and wiser than yourself to share in your folly. Is it not evident that if the ether were affected to the degree which he maintains, and if it were obnoxious ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the place greeted Colin and proceeded to deliver himself of a humorous rigmarole, designed for the benefit of tourists. It was pure 'nature-faking,' since it ascribed human characteristics to some of the fish in the pool, the various specimens being called the "bride" and "groom" and so forth. ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... you are undone. I cannot tell you exactly what would happen, because it would be a tragedy without precedent, but it is impossible that German officials would surrender a trunk without receiving a Schein in exchange; at least, not without months of rigmarole and delay. Even when it is the official who blunders the public suffers for it. We were travelling some years ago from Leipzig to London when the guard examining our tickets let one blow away. Luckily some German gentlemen in the carriage with us ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... there, Dixie," he said, firmly. "I'm going to stick right here, and do the best I can. Folks may talk some about me and Hettie not living together, but I can't put up with all that rigmarole over there. It would ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... preservation of all the essentials of poetry, by the simple enumeration of the utensils to be found in a back kitchen, did, I could not help thinking (here it becomes necessary to whisper), sound not unlike rigmarole. I waited for the master to speak. He had declared that the Republic would fall if it did not become instantly naturalistic; he would not, he could not pass over in silence so important a branch of literature as poetry, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... could have imagined that old Thaddeus McIlvaine had looked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man. But don't let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep an impression on you. The first thing the young fellow did was to get rid of that machine of his uncle's. Can you imagine his uncle having ...
— McIlvaine's Star • August Derleth
... she knew what she was a-saying of. He questioned her fiercely, but there was nothing to be got out of her rigmarole account, which Fenwick cut short by retreating into the studio in the ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I pray, a rigmarole which cannot affect me. Besides, I do not blame you particularly. I know the heart of man too well not to be sure, that, in acting thus, you have followed much less the inspirations of your own heart than the suggestions made by ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... and ways in which Lot and Abraham were walked into the conversation were incalculable,—and unintelligible except to the person who understood it only too well. On one occasion Mrs. Evelyn went on with a long rigmarole to Mr. Thorn about sea-breezes, with a face of most exquisite delight at his mystification and her own hidden fun; till Fleda was absolutely trembling. Fleda shunned both the gentlemen at length with ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... the road but the rate they are going, continue to take a part so contrary to all his own interests and feelings, and to the feelings and interests of all the respectable part of his country.... But what is to be the end of all this rigmarole of mine? To conclude, this—to advise you, for your own sake as a tradesman, for Lord Byron's sake as a poet, for the sake of good literature and good principles, which ought to be united, to take such measures as you may be able to venture upon to get Lord Byron to revise these two cantos, and ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... remembered it. It certainly had not flattered her. She was dressed in black. Her face would have been fresh under her bright hair, but the eyes were drawn, and the lips quivered that spoke to me, quivered in a pitiful fashion. I told her how I came from her husband. I embarked on a longish rigmarole as to the luck that brought me her way after all, against expectations. She listened without saying a word. Then I told her about him, and she listened patiently. 'I seem to have felt him with me on ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... a rigmarole of all sorts of stories, many of which (like the dollar he took from Mr. Tarleton's head) were plain enough to me, but others I could make nothing of; and the thing that most surprised the Kanakas was what surprised ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Ned, "don't you know"—then checking himself suddenly, "Ah! by the by, that rigmarole oath! I was not to tell; though now it's past caring for, I fear! It is no use looking after the seal when the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... long rigmarole, I have, dear B—, what you, no doubt, perceive, for the metaphysical poets as poets, the most sovereign contempt. That ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... to Jack, and scarcely less so to Carlos, to observe the sympathetic courtesy with which the English Consul listened to all this rigmarole, which, from his manner, one might have believed to have been absolutely convincing—until ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood |
