"Superfine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that Mr. Sponge availed himself of as far as his 'traps' were concerned, though he preferred cantering over on his piebald to trailing along in Jog's jingling chay. So matters were arranged, and Mr. Sponge forthwith proceeded to put his brown boots, his substantial cords, his superfine tights, his cuttey scarlet, his dress blue saxony, his clean linen, his heavy spurs, and though last, not least in importance, his now backless Mogg, into his solid leather portmanteau, sweeping the surplus of his wardrobe into a capacious carpet-bag. While the guest was ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... sheet is filling with dull talk about mere economics! I must still add that the Lecturing I talked of, last time, is verily over now; and well over. The superfine people listened to the rough utterance with patience, with favor, increasing to the last. I sent you a Newspaper once, to indicate that it was in progress. I know not yet what the money result is; but I suppose it will enable us to exist here thriftily another year; not without hope ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... back in her chair, regarding me, her lips slightly parted. All at once the full flavour of her, the superfine quality was revealed after years of blindness.—Nor can I describe the sudden rebellion, the revulsion that I experienced. Hambleton Durrett! It was an outrage, a sacrilege! I got up, and put my hand on the mantel. Nancy remained motionless, inert, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... forever upon the forehead of Corneille; but he had inherited the wit, and indeed the brilliant wit (bel esprit), which the great tragedian hid beneath the splendors of his genius. He began with those writings, superfine (precieux), dainty, tricked out in the fashion of the court and the drawing-room, which ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... works of art, matter for kisses, the realised stuff of dreams! When you look at them like that, solely in the decorative sense, you are ready to condemn those who work, who think and who concentrate upon an aim of some sort, for these superfine creatures carry the reason for their existence within themselves, so great is the perfection which they achieve with a gesture, an attitude, a glance. And then you reflect upon what they too often are in the privacy of their lives: narrow and domineering, attached to petty, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... Sea Islands were astonished and alarmed when they, first saw the Europeans strip. Yet they would have been much more so, could they have entered into the notions prevalent in the civilized world on the subject of a wardrobe; could they have understood how much virtue lies inherent in a superfine broad cloth, how much respectability in a gilt button, how much sense in the tie of a cravat, how much amiability in the cut of a sleeve, how much merit of every sort in a Stultz and a Hoby. There are who pretend, and that with some plausibilty, that these things ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... said, drawing her hand away from him; 'I am not made of such superfine stuff—I never pretended to be! Do you think I should be content to be an unknown genius? Never!—I must have my fame counted out to me in good current coin, that all the world may hear and see. It may be vulgar—I don't care! it is so. Ah, mon Dieu!' and she began to pace ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... retained the Presbyterianism into which he was born. Erskine, who was afterwards raised to the Bench as Lord Kinnedder—a distinction which he did not survive for many months—was a good classic, a man of fine, or, as some of his companions thought, of almost superfine taste. The style apparently for which he had credit must have been a somewhat mimini-pimini style, if we may judge by Scott's attempt in The Bridal of Triermain, to write in a manner which he intended to be attributed to his friend. Erskine was left a widower in middle ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine, Rich canary with sherry and tent superfine. Like a right honest soul, faith, he took off his bowl, Till at last he began for to tumble and roul From his chair to the floor, where he sleeping did snore, Being seven times ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... and calls for the tawdry curtain to rise, when a gentleman entered, sauntered up to a front seat, took up a bill and began to read it—a tall, middle-aged, rather distinguished-looking man, black and bearded, with piercing eyes, superfine clothes, and a general aristocratic air ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... and good temper, there is Dickens' royal gift of humour. As some actors have only to show their face and utter a word or two, in order to convulse an audience with merriment, so here does almost every sentence hold good and honest laughter. Not, perhaps, objects the superfine and too dainty critic, humour of the most delicate sort—not humour that for its rare and exquisite quality can be placed beside the masterpieces in that kind of Lamb, or Sterne, or Goldsmith, or Washington Irving. Granted freely; not humour of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... deer tendons; fifty catties of bche-de-mer; fifty deer tongues; fifty ox tongues; twenty catties of dried clams; filberts, fir-cones, peaches, apricots and squash, two hundred bags of each; fifty pair of salt prawns; two hundred catties of dried shrimps; a thousand catties of superfine, picked charcoal; two thousand catties of medium charcoal; twenty thousand catties of common charcoal; two piculs of red rice, grown in the imperial grounds; fifty bushels of greenish, glutinous rice; fifty bushels of white glutinous ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... as my hand fell on a large square parcel—"here is some superfine tobacco that I got in Quebec for you and the other men on this trip. Not like the damp stuff you had last year—a little bad smoke and too many bad words. This is tobacco to burn—something quite particular, you understand. How does ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... to be instituted. Instead of rich and poor, high and low, they are to be classed,—First, by their sorrows: for instance, whenever there are any, whether in fair mansion or hovel, who are mourning the loss of relations and friends, and who wear black, whether the cloth be coarse or superfine, they are to make one class. Secondly, all who have the same maladies, whether they lie under damask canopies or on straw pallets or in the wards of hospitals, they are to form one class. Thirdly, all who are guilty ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... room a door opened at the farther end of the same wing, and a tall man came out. The middle-class element in her said, "Superfine." His fastidious taste said, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... gallipot and squeeze thereto a fresh orange, one spoon of which, with a spoon of the pulp of the pippin, laid into a thin royal paste, laid into small shallow pans or saucers, brushed with melted butter, and some superfine sugar sifted thereon, with a gentle ...
— American Cookery - The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables • Amelia Simmons
... gold; excellent; better; superior &c 33; above par; nice, fine; genuine &c (true) 494. best, choice, select, picked, elect, recherche, rare, priceless; unparagoned^, unparalleled &c (supreme) 33; superlatively &c 33; good; bully [Slang], crackajack [Slang], giltedged; superfine, superexcellent^; of the first water; first-rate, first-class; high- wrought, exquisite, very best, crack, prime, tiptop, capital, cardinal; standard &c (perfect) 650; inimitable. admirable, estimable; praiseworthy &c (approve) 931; pleasing &c 829; couleur de ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was slender, pale, and elegant looking; she had a very pretty head and brilliant auburn hair, which she braided with classical simplicity. She talked in a sweet, soft voice, used language at times a trifle superfine, and made literary allusions. These had often a patriotic strain, and Rowland had more than once been irritated by her quotations from Mrs. Sigourney in the cork-woods of Monte Mario, and from Mr. Willis among the ruins of Veii. Rowland was of a dozen different minds about her, and was half surprised, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... is a view of the superfine system of moral philosophy. A meeting of learned men is discussing the ever-recurring problem of happiness, and one of them ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... could Assume a flippant guise; Or, were I forty years, I should Undoubtedly look wise; For forty years are said to bring Sedateness superfine; But thirty-nine don't mean a ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... ring with a spirit and gusto recalling Lady Mary's phrase concerning her cousin "that no man enjoyed life more than he did." To quote again from Mr Gosse: "A good deal in this book may offend the fine, and not merely the superfine. But the vitality and elastic vigour of the whole carry us over every difficulty... and we pause at the close of the novel to reflect on the amazing freshness of the talent which could thus make a set of West country scenes, in that despised thing, a novel, blaze ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... But this is only Mr. Harrison's sweeping style of writing. He is always vivid, and nearly always superlative. We venture to think that his "all" merely includes his own circle. At the same time, however, we admit that militant Atheism is still, as of old, an offence to the superfine sceptics who desire to stand well with the great firm of Bumble and Grundy, as well as to the vast army of priests and preachers who have a professional interest in keeping heresy "dark," and to the ruling and privileged classes, who feel that militant Atheism is a great ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... The President's guards were certainly fine men, and a squadron of dismounted cavalry, in splendid blue uniforms, with scarlet trowsers richly laced, might have vied with the elite of Nap's own, barring the black faces. But the materiel of the other regiments was not superfine, as M. Boyer, before whom they were defiling, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Dymond—Tom's sweetheart—once mentioned that her aunt lived near there, and it lay on the surface that Tom had gone to help the dockers, who were imitating their London brethren. Mrs. Drabdump did not need to be told things to be aware of them. She went back to prepare Mr. Constant's superfine tea, vaguely wondering why people were so discontented nowadays. But when she brought up the tea and the toast and the eggs to Mr. Constant's sitting-room (which adjoined his bedroom, though without communicating ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... contrary, is the frame of every one who aspires beyond the work of his hands. I do not know how it had become mine, except through my reading, and I think it was through the devotion I then had for a certain author that I came to a knowledge not of good and evil so much as of common and superfine. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... called, from a desire of being set to sleep. Within a few days, however, I learnt that it had of late become very fashionable and genteel to appear half asleep, and that one could exhibit no better mark of superfine breeding than by occasionally in company setting one's ronchal organ in action. I then ceased to wonder at the popularity, which I found nearly universal, of —-'s poetry; for, certainly in order to make one's self appear sleepy in company, or occasionally to induce sleep, nothing could be more ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the potion should be heady, As Circe's cup, or gin of Deady, Water from the crystal spring. Thirty quarterns, draw and bring; Let it, after ebullition, Cool to natural condition. Add, of powder saccharine, Pounds thrice five, twice superfine; Mingle sweetest orange blood, And the lemon's acid flood; Mingle well, and blend the whole With the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... acrobatic fame, at others indulging in leap-frog with the servants, permitting themselves practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a passage at which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise; though there is nothing quite so bad in the Noctes as the picture of the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the Recreations, a picture for which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts of prejudice, literary, political, ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... kept it in complete subordination to the duties of life, which she performed with exemplary conscientiousness in the house of mourning as well as in the house of feasting. Even her needlework was superfine. We doubt not that, if the truth was known, she was a ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... was that of a certain stylish young gentleman, a great exquisite, in whose judicious eyes my daughter Anna had found especial favor. He called upon the young lady one evening, and found her alone in the dining-room at her needlework. He stayed rather late; and after abundance of superfine discourse, all the while retaining his hat and cane, made his profuse adieus, and with repeated graceful bows proceeded to depart, after fashion of courtiers from the Queen, and by so doing, opening a door at random, with one hand placed behind, very ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... In the next place, even supposing he had been ever inclined to fall in love with her, which her new sardonic fairness of mind obliged her to regard as entirely doubtful, he was a man to whom marriage was impossible. How could any one expect such a superfine dreamer to turn bread-winner for a wife and household? Imagine Mr. Langham interviewed by a rate-collector or troubled about coals! As to her—simply—she had misunderstood the laws of the game. It was a little bitter to have ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... here's a very rich one; real Genoa, and a splendid black; we call it the 'Luxury of Woe.' It's only eighteen shillings a yard, and a superb quality; fit, in short, for the handsomest style of domestic calamity.' Here the Squire wants to know 'whether sorrow gets more superfine as it goes upward in life.' 'Certainly—yes, Sir—by all means,' responds the clerk; 'at least, a finer texture. The mourning of poor people is very coarse, very; quite different from that of persons of quality. Canvass to crape, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... barbarism again. Then, when we are forced back into natural conditions, the new race will be born. No more of your big-headed, spindle-shanked manikins: we shall have a chance then of seeing a man—that is, a perfect animal. You may turn up your nose, my superfine lady: let me tell you that this glorious animalism means sanity, and sanity means strength, and strength ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... occasion of his Highness's new field-marshal's suit, we suppose): "Here," said he, "see what we have done for him: his quarter's tailor's bill now comes to more than his annual income formerly amounted to." Mr. H-s-ly sports a bit of blood, a dennet, and a filly; and, for a tailor, is a superfine sort of dandy, but with a strong scent of the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... ruffling their feathers and making them scream, were it only to let the world know how unmelodious were their voices. It was generally in the presence of prudes that he referred to unnamable things; and he most affected low phrases when he talked to very superfine people. Still, the vein of coarseness was in him, like the baser stuffs in the ores of precious metals; but his literary ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... puzzled. Was she unthinkably simple and natural, or was she immeasurably deep? Was her apparent utter unconsciousness of the effect she produced a superfine art? He couldn't decide. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... information on all the various subjects and incidents of the day, very modest and unassuming, and delighting in society at his own house. I have seen him frequently. His head was covered with a thick suit of white hair, which gave him a very dignified and venerable appearance. His dress was uniformly of superfine broadcloth, made in the old style of a plain coat, with straight collar and long waistcoat, and a broad-brimmed hat. His color was not jet-black, but decidedly negro. In size and personal appearance, the statue of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... girl is commonplace, you say? Well, well, I grant it, as you use the phrase Concede the whole; although there was a day When I too questioned words, and from a maze Of hairsplit meanings, cut with close-drawn line, Sought to draw out a language superfine, Above the common, scarify with words and scintillate with pen; But that time's over—now I am content ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... to No. 100 Lucre Avenue, talk fully with Mrs. Vanderdonk, and then ride down to Jardon & Jackson's and get all the material you think will be required. You will observe, she lays great stress on the superfine quality of the plush. Order the bill delivered with the goods; and if anything be required in your department, you had better leave the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson |
