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More "Cumbrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... than eighty strong, and chiefly consisted of cavalry. Armed with pitchforks and cumbrous scythes where they were not able to lay their hands on the more orthodox weapons of war, they presented a determined appearance; the few foot-soldiers who had no cart-horses at their disposal bearing in their arms bundles of firewood. One memorable morning they set out to avenge their losses; ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... so many English battle-fields. Hard by, we see the long white front or rear of Somerset House, and, farther on, rise the two new Houses of Parliament, with a huge unfinished tower already hiding its imperfect summit in the smoky canopy,—the whole vast and cumbrous edifice a specimen of the best that modern architecture can effect, elaborately imitating the masterpieces of those simple ages when men "builded better than they knew." Close by it, we have a glimpse of the roof and upper towers of the holy Abbey; while that gray, ancestral pile on the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... celebrations. For a week he spent his days in the unaccustomed but truly royal occupation of field sports. Once he visited Josephine at Malmaison. The next months he had spent again in Paris conducting the matrimonial negotiations and arranging every detail of the etiquette to be observed in the cumbrous ceremonial which he had devised for the celebration of his marriage in France. When all was completed to his satisfaction he left for Compiegne to supervise the arrangements made for the reception of his new consort, and spent the last week of waiting there. Of all his family the giddiest ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of their fists. It is worth asking: What is this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace? What is this emotion which leads men to be heroic by proxy? Is it surviving physical excellence which reveals itself in this way, or is it a cumbrous atavistic relic like the appendix which the doctors remove? We see, for instance, enormous crowds gathering at the football matches where professional players show their prowess, and muscles trained and hardened for the fray. We ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... faithful representation of the manners, customs, and daily life and speech of his own time, in "The Canterbury Tales," are sweepingly advanced against his works at large. In an allegory — rendered perhaps somewhat cumbrous by the detail of chivalric ceremonial, and the heraldic minuteness, which entered so liberally into poetry, as into the daily life of the classes for whom poetry was then written — Chaucer beautifully enforces the lasting advantages ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... flew to their posts; and whilst the cumbrous screw was descending slowly into the water, the stokers had roused the smouldering ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... Cour's brief and unsuccessful appearance as an actress she had taken part in a play with the rather cumbrous title, Who Puts out the Eyes must Pay for Them. The widow may have forgotten this event; its occurrence so many years before may have been merely a sinister coincidence. But the incident of the ballet-dancer and her sightless lover was ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... so large, and lay at such grand distance to the eye of childhood, are now near by, and have fallen away to mere rolling waves of upland. The garden-fence, that was so gigantic, is now only a simple paling; its gate that was such a cumbrous affair—reminding you of Gaza—you might easily lift from its hinges. The lofty dove-cote, which seemed to rise like a monument of art before your boyish vision, is now only a flimsy box upon ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... Being always on the alert for squalls, I ran to the bow. There could be no doubt it was a squall, and as I listened I thought I heard the murmur of the coming gale. Instantly I began to work might and main at my cumbrous tackle for shortening sail, and in the course of an hour and a half had the most of it reduced—the topsail yards down on the caps, the topsails clewed up, the sheets hauled in, the main and fore peaks lowered, and the flying-jib down. While thus engaged, the dawn advanced, and I cast an ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... President's cumbrous way of joking; the short, fat man was heavily ironical with ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... inconsistent with that of the metal breastplate; "the shield" covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." [Footnote: Classical Review, ix. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... of boats, an object of attraction to all strangers, but more so from the novelty and singularity of its construction than from its beauty. Utility rather than elegance was consulted by the builder. This far-famed structure is ugly and cumbrous, and a passenger feels a very unpleasing sensation if he happens to stand upon it when a loaded waggon drives along it at low water, at which time there is a considerable descent from the side of the suburbs. An undulatory motion is then occasioned, which goes on gradually ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... commandeered for a bathing-place; the village school was turned, every evening, into a recreation room; and a communicants' class was started. Not for the first time I longed for a brief, clear statement of our Church's faith. The cumbrous complicated Catechisms and Confessions are magnificent monuments, but they are worse than useless under such conditions. A Credo which could be written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's essential Confession ...
— On the King's Service - Inward Glimpses of Men at Arms • Innes Logan
... a sheltered corner. A little farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies of "Seventy-fives." Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always attended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giant gazelles feeding among elephants; and the stables of woven pine-boughs which stood near by might have been the ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... primarily the function of the President, with the limitation that the Senate must concur in diplomatic appointments and in the validity of treaties, and that only both Houses of Congress could jointly declare war. This cumbrous system necessarily required that the President in conducting the foreign relations of the Government should keep in touch with the Senate, and such was the accepted procedure throughout the history of the nation until President ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... found it impossible to move her, strive how I would. Hereupon, and after some painful thought, I took to digging away the sand, undermining her thus until she lay so nicely balanced it needed but a push and the cumbrous structure, rolling gently over, lay in the necessary posture, viz: with her starboard beam accessible from gunwale to keel. And mightily heartened was I thus to discover her damage hereabouts so much less than ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... or tenth of July, in the afternoon; and the day being very sultry, the heat had oppressed me with langour, and I was all day as one laden with sleep. But no sooner had Mrs Aird told me this, than I felt the langour depart from me, as if a cumbrous cloak had been taken away, and I rose up a recruited and reanimated man. It was so much the end of my debility of body and sorrowing of mind, that she was loquacious with her surprise when she saw me, as it were, with a miraculous restoration, prepare myself to go out in order to learn, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... masters of a remittance of 100,000 dollars, destined for the mine-workers of Pasco. The silver bars from Pasco are sent to Lima without any military guard, for they are suffered to pass unmolested, as the robbers find them heavy and cumbrous, and they cannot easily dispose of them. These depredations are committed close to the gates of Lima, and after having plundered a number of travellers, the robbers will very ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... how these cumbrous gauds, These veils oppress me! What officious hand Has tied these knots, and gather'd o'er my brow These clustering coils? How all conspires ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... all this. He estimated that the necessary amount of baggage would thus be doubled, perhaps trebled, and that the 1,600 or 2,400 pagazis that would be required would make the expedition too cumbrous. Dr. Strahl proposed that transportation by pagazis should be relinquished altogether, and that beasts of burden should be used exclusively. He knew well that in the low lands of Equatorial Africa the tsetse-fly and ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... A loud shout, a deafening volley, the agonizing cry of the wounded and the dying, were all I heard, as my horse, rearing madly upward, plunged twice into the air, and then fell dead upon the earth, crushing me beneath his cumbrous weight, lifeless ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... all standing near the door, and, with a complete disbelief in all that he was hearing and seeing, Oliver heard Mrs. Severance's voice in his ear, "The kitchen—fire-escape—" saw her push Ted toward him as if she were shifting a piece of cumbrous furniture, and obeyed her orders implicitly because he was too surprised to ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... these places would remain longest, though not perhaps finally, sacred from the grasp of a tyrannical government. But let there be a demand for capital to support a profitable commerce, and the mass is at once consigned to the furnace, and, ceasing to be a vain and cumbrous ornament of the banquet, becomes a potent and active agent for furthering ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... conveyed to Wylam on a waggon, and there mounted upon a wooden frame supported by four pairs of wheels, which had been constructed for its reception. A barrel of water, placed on another frame upon wheels, was attached to it as a tender. After a great deal of labour, the cumbrous machine was got upon the road. At first it would not move an inch. Its maker, Tommy Waters, became impatient, and at length enraged, and taking hold of the lever of the safety valve, declared in his desperation, that "either she or he should go." At length the machinery was set in motion, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... prospective legislation, the Commons unanimously determined to treat the offences which the Committee had brought to light as high crimes against the State, and to employ against a few cunning mercers in Nicholas Lane and the Old Jewry all the gorgeous and cumbrous machinery which ought to be reserved for the delinquencies of great Ministers and Judges. It was resolved, without a division, that several Frenchmen and one Englishman who had been deeply concerned in the contraband trade should ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cowslip-coloured face of EXETER—what lambent fire, what looks of Christian love play about and beam from the whole episcopal Bench!—"No!" they cry—"we will no longer have the spirit oppressed by these cumbrous trappings of fleshy pride! We will promote an universal Christian education—we will teach charity by examples, and live unto all men by a personal abstinence from the bickerings and malice of civil life. We will not defile the sacred lawn with the mud of turnpike acts—we will no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... is not yet introduced into most gymnasiums, in spite of the recommendations of the Roxbury Hercules: beside the fear of straining, there is the cumbrous weight and cost of iron apparatus, while, for some reason or other, no cheap and accurate dynamometer has yet come into the market. Running and jumping, also, have as yet been too much neglected in our institutions, or practised spasmodically ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... engaged in erecting this cumbrous machine, a young alligator, about a foot long, crawled out from under some leaves on the bank close to him. The urchin saw it instantly, seized his bow, and in a moment transfixed it with an arrow. The fury of the little creature, infant though it was, seemed tremendous. It turned ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness of sombre life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being assigned to it,—it being so much believed in,—it was indeed a feast. The cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding it heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these Englishmen ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... laid the cloth there with admirable precision and neatness; ranged the plate on the sideboard with graceful accuracy, but objected to that old thing in the centre, as he called Mrs. Gashleigh's silver basket, as cumbrous and useless for the table, where they would want all the ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the saddle again when Gabriel arrived at the side of the carriage. He then made a momentary pause. In the brilliant moonlight every detail of the equipage was visible; the coach was dingy and battered, its principal color blue, and covered, according to the fashion, with gilded arabesques in cumbrous relief, in which a curious dragon, with a barbed tongue and tail, was contending in a hundred repetitions with as many little cupids. Just as these details seized upon his imagination, the window was suddenly opened, and a lady put out her head ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber's crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment. A flag locker was in one corner, open, exposing various colored bunting, some rolled up, others half unrolled, still others tumbled. Opposite was a cumbrous washstand, of black mahogany, all of one block, with a pedestal, like a font, and over it a railed shelf, containing combs, brushes, and other implements of the toilet. A torn hammock of stained grass swung near; the sheets ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... water in your house that you can afford, and enlarge your ideas of the worth of it, that you may afford a great deal. A bathing-room is nothing to you that requires an hour of lifting and fire-making to prepare it for use. The apparatus is too cumbrous,—you do not turn to it. But when your chamber opens upon a neat, quiet little nook, and you have only to turn your stop-cocks and all is ready, your remedy is at hand,—you use it constantly. You are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... 74, Figs. 2 and 3) are thick, heavy, cumbrous weapons, made out of the wood used for making wooden dishes. The outer surfaces are convex, and the inner ones concave, the natural convexity of the circular trunk of the tree from which they are made ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... baked. This diet becomes pretty monotonous, but is the traveller's universal fare in Keewatin. In those far regions men are not particular how or what they eat; of necessity they abandon the refinements of civilisation as needless and cumbrous. To-day, however, partly to protract his stay and so give Spurling time, partly to assert his waning gentility, the memory of which in its heyday Strangeways shared, he attempted to be lavish, to set a table, ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... is treasonable to say so, I confess I think this inscription somewhat cumbrous and awkward. The antithesis is not a good one, between the difficulty of Jeanie's 'personal exertions' and the laudableness of the motive which led to them. And there is something not metaphysically correct in the combination described ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... British arms in that quarter seems not to have been palliated by those precautions and that presence of mind which, even in defeat, reflects lustre on a commander. In rapid retreats from a pursuing enemy cumbrous and useless baggage is abandoned, and bridges and roads are destroyed and rendered as impassable as possible, in order to impede the progress of the pursuers; but General Proctor encumbered himself with a cumbrous load of baggage, and left the bridges and roads in his rear entire, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... dressed in an old-fashioned riding-habit, with a broad-brimmed white beaver hat, such as may be seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds' paintings. She rode a sleek white pony, and was followed by a footman in rich livery, mounted on an over-fed hunter. At a little distance in the rear came an ancient cumbrous chariot, drawn by two very corpulent horses, driven by as corpulent a coachman, beside whom sat a page dressed in a fanciful green livery. Inside of the chariot was a starched prim personage, with a look somewhat between a lady's companion and a lady's maid; and two ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy and cumbrous—the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men; generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space, mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of something better than ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... then, thundered the afternoon express from Paris, bearing the advance guard of the summer seekers after happiness. But if the cumbrous coaches carried swiftly onward some gay hearts, some young lovers to never-to-be-forgotten scenes, one there was among the throng to whom the world was gray—an English gentleman this, who gazed indifferently upon ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... but now his contribution to the common enjoyment was to venture as near as possible to all perilous edges; to throw stones into the water, and to make as if to throw them over precipices on the people below; to pepper his father with questions, and to collect cumbrous mementos of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. He kept the carriage waiting a good five minutes, while he could cut his initials on a band-rail. "You can come back and see 'em on your bridal tower," said ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... as you know, that there seems to me far too cumbrous and expensive and talkative a method employed in England, for raising supplies for that Mission and Columbia, Honolulu, &c. I never think of all that fuss of the four Universities, and all the meetings and speeches, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... several of the smaller being united in the choice of one. The army of the Confederation was fixed, in 1830, at 303,484 men, to be furnished by the States in a fixed proportion. The inconveniences of this cumbrous organization are apparent. One member might be at war with any power, while the others were at peace: thus the Confederation took no part in the Italian and Hungarian warfare against Austria, for it guaranteed to her only the possession of her German ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... always too large, the eyelids too wide open and the dilated pupils seem to stare at us with alarm. Amongst these mummy cases and these coffin lids fashioned in the shape of the human figure, there are some that seem to have been made for giants; the head especially, beneath its cumbrous head-dress, the head stuffed as it were between the hunchback shoulders, looks enormous, out of all proportion to the body which, towards the feet, narrows like ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... some of those insects open and close their wings no less than two hundred times in a second. It is amazing. And is it not suggestive of the capacity of motion with which this body may easily be endowed when the cumbrous flesh is changed into the immortal, ethereal body? Since those tiny insects are so wonderfully endowed for their little life here, so aimless as it might seem, what glorious capacities may not be in reserve for us, God's redeemed children, who are to live forever, ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... of cumbrous and unmanageable machine, Sam Weller imagined a habeas-corpus to be, does not appear; for Perker, at that moment, walked up and took Mr. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... Knights of St. John is paved over with sprawling heraldic devices of the dead gentlemen of the dead Order; as if, in the next world, they expected to take rank in conformity with their pedigrees, and would be marshalled into heaven according to the orders of precedence. Cumbrous handsome paintings adorn the walls and chapels, decorated with pompous monuments of Grand Masters. Beneath is a crypt, where more of these honourable and reverend warriors lie, in a state that a Simpson would admire. In the altar are ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than all the other irritating elements in his environment put together, Cameron chafed under the unceasing rasp of Perkins' wit, clever, if somewhat crude and cumbrous. Perkins had never forgotten nor forgiven his defeat at the turnip-hoeing, which he attributed chiefly to Cameron. His gibes at Cameron's awkwardness in the various operations on the farm, his readiness to seize every opportunity for ridicule, his skill at creating awkward situations, all ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... assessed in proportion to the value of lands in the several States. The question of control of territory was not distinctly settled by the articles. The powers to be conferred upon the Confederation were practically limited to war, peace, and foreign affairs. A cumbrous system of arbitration courts was established for disputes between States, but there was no machinery for settling quarrels between States and the ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... one, father prior," said the youth, yawning; "Nor have I much objection to taking arms, excepting that they are a somewhat cumbrous garb, and in February a furred mantle is more suiting to the weather than a steel corselet. And it irks me the more to put on cold harness in this nipping weather, that, would but the church send a detachment of their saints—and ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Harry learned that there was no difficulty as to men, as any number of these could be recruited among the peasantry. There was, however, an entire absence of any arms save pikes. Harry knew how good a weapon are these when used by steady and well-disciplined men. The matchlocks of those days were cumbrous arms, and it was at the point of the pike that battles were then ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... to the question, can give a reasonable ground for his alarm. There are but two nations in the world—our own country and France—that can put England into this singular state. It is the united sensitiveness of a people extremely well-to-do, most anxious for the preservation of the cumbrous and moss-grown prosperity which they have been so long in consolidating, and incompetent (owing to the national half-sightedness, and their habit of trusting to a few leading minds for their public opinion) to judge when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to shun the coming fight? Me wouldst thou move to base, inglorious flight? Know, 'tis not honest in my soul to fear, Nor was Tydides born to tremble here. I hate the cumbrous chariot's slow advance, And the long distance of the flying lance; But while my nerves are strong, my force entire, Thus front the foe, and emulate my sire. Nor shall yon steeds, that fierce to fight convey ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... ocean was composed of a smooth, even surface of fine sand and gravel, along which Brandon moved without difficulty. The cumbrous armor of the diver, which on land is so heavy, beneath the water loses its excessive weight, and by steadying the wearer assists him to walk. The water was marvelously transparent, as is usually the case in the southern seas, and through the ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... breeze from the open sea, and brings in with it a strong swell into the channel; which was no inconvenience to the Greek ships, which were low- built, and little above the water, but did much hurt to the Persians, which had high sterns and lofty decks, and were heavy and cumbrous in their movements, as it presented them broadside to the quick charges of the Greeks, who kept their eyes upon the motions of Themistocles, as their best example, and more particularly because, opposed to his ship, Ariamenes, admiral to Xerxes, a brave man, and by ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... coming out to be paraded for admiration and to loosen their muscles with a few stretching gallops. Each was ridden by his owner, each bore a range saddle. To one accustomed to jockeys and racing-pads, these full-grown riders and cumbrous trappings made the cowponies seem small but they were finely formed, the pick of the range. The days of mongrel breeds are long since over in the West. Smaller heads, longer necks, more sloping shoulders, told of good blood crossed on the range stock. Still, the base-stock showed clearly ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... her wolfish brood Bay his mild radiance, impotent and fell; Calm in his halls of brightness he shall dwell! 5 For lo! RELIGION at his strong behest Starts with mild anger from the Papal spell, And flings to Earth her tinsel-glittering vest, Her mitred State and cumbrous Pomp unholy; And JUSTICE wakes to bid th' Oppressor wail 10 Insulting aye the wrongs of patient Folly; And from her dark retreat by Wisdom won Meek NATURE slowly lifts her matron veil To smile with fondness ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... be imagined, that a poem constructed upon such a plan, must be full of cumbrous and misplaced description, and overloaded with a crowd of incidents equally unmeaning and ill assorted. The tedious account of the palace of Shedad, in the first book—the description of the Summer ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... darkened enthusiasm; whereat Richard puffed and swelled. Perhaps his Daily Tory letters did have the rhetorical tread of the Scotchman's masterpiece. In any event it was pleasant to have Dorothy think so. Before he could frame his modesty to fit reply, the cumbrous retreat of Senator Loot ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the heat of the sun was great, Papeiha looked out and saw the priest tottering along with bent and aching shoulders. On his back was his cumbrous wooden god. Behind the priest came a furious crowd, waving their arms and ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... through neglect of the Bible on one hand, or through wrong teaching about it on the other. Not in his ideas alone, but markedly in his style, Arnold has felt the Biblical influence. He came at a time when there was strong temptation to fall into cumbrous German ways of speech. Against that Arnold set a simple phraseology, and he held out the English Bible constantly as a model by which the men of England ought to learn to write. He never gained the simplicity of the old Hebrew ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... objects were uncommon, and proportioned to the merits of one so highly placed. She thought little of her reputation, but much of her glory. To appear yielding, and to be unapproachable, is perfection. Josiana felt herself majestic and material. Hers was a cumbrous beauty. She usurped rather than charmed. She trod upon hearts. She was earthly. She would have been as much astonished at being proved to have a soul in her bosom as wings on her back. She discoursed on Locke; she was polite; she was ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... instance, perhaps, to be anywhere found, Bronzino's treatment of the same subject (Christ visiting the spirits in prison,) in the picture now in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii, which, vile as it is in color, vacant in invention, void in light and shade, a heap of cumbrous nothingnesses, and sickening offensivenesses, is of all its voids most void in this, that the academy models therein huddled together at the bottom, show not so much unity or community of attention to the academy model with the flag in ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... poetry and virtue go always together is an opinion so pleasing that I can forgive him who resolves to think it true. The third stanza sounds big with "Delphi," and "AEgean," and "Ilissus," and "Meander," and "hallowed fountains," and "solemn sound;" but in all Gray's odes there is a kind of cumbrous splendour which we wish away. His position is at last false. In the time of Dante and Petrarch, from whom we derive our first school of poetry, Italy was overrun by "tyrant power" and "coward vice;" nor was our state much better when we ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... sailors of that coast. Next, we sought the guidance of the Brethren of the Trinity, and built a lighthouse on the Snout, to be a Channel beacon for sea-going ships, as Maskew's match had been a light for our fishing-boats in the past. Lastly, we beautified the church, turning out the cumbrous seats of oak, and neatly pewing it with deal and baize, that made it most commodious to sit in of the Sabbath. There was also much old glass which we removed, and reglazed all the windows tight against the wind, so that what with a high pulpit, reading-desk, and ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... duty to go out and interview him. There was something peculiarly and touchingly romantic about the creature and his strange actions, according to the newspaper reports. He was represented as being hairy, long-armed, and of great strength and stature; ugly and cumbrous; avoiding men, but appearing suddenly and unexpectedly to women and children; going armed with a club, but never molesting any creature, except sheep, or other prey; fond of eating and drinking, and not particular ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the book is admirable. At the commencement of each chapter we have the titles of the various sections, and each successive section is introduced by a statement of the contents of each clause. This facilitates search, though it necessitates the cumbrous mode of reference adopted in the foot-notes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... did not exist, and implied surrounding circumstances in ludicrous contrast with fact, and men taught themselves to speak in character, and prided themselves on keeping it up by substituting for the ordinary language of life and emotion a cumbrous and involved ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... without evident regret) upon the clapboards as Lige fired them. Flames burst forth almost instantly, and the smoke, uniting with that now rolling out of every window of the saloon, went up to heaven in a cumbrous, gray column. ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... life, "you consider old Sal as a sort of saucy, flippant trollope, belonging to nobody, and not worth fathering." But, nevertheless, Irving's genius was trying its wings in it, and pluming itself for flight. Salmagundi undoubtedly, to a later taste, is rather crude and cumbrous fun, but it is interesting as the immediate forerunner of our earliest work of sustained humor, and of the wit of Holmes and Lowell at a later date. When it was discontinued, at the beginning of 1808, ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... methodize, regulate, systematize, coordinate, organize, settle, fix. unravel, disentangle, ravel, card; disembroil[obs3]; feaze[obs3]. Adj. arranged &c. v.; embattled, in battle array; cut and dried; methodical, orderly, regular, systematic. Phr. "In vast cumbrous ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated; the field of politics supplies the alchemists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and ...
— Orations • John Quincy Adams
... "The Adventures of Roderick Random" (the cumbrous full titles of earlier fiction are for apparent reasons frequently curtailed in the present treatment), published when the author was twenty-seven, he avails himself of a residence of some years in Jamaica to depict life in that quarter of the world at a time when the local color ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... that the alert and inventive spirit of the American has lightened the cumbrous awkwardness of Old-World implements, has simplified their traditional complexity, has systematized methods of manufacture, and has shown a certain audacity in its innovations which might be expected from a community where every mechanic is a voter, and a maker of lawgivers, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... walking and they arrived at the stables of the elephants. These, like those of the horses and the oxen which drew the cumbrous war machines, were formed in the vast thickness of the walls, and were what are known in modern times as casemates. As Nessus had said, the Indian mahout and the other two Arabs were the only human occupants of the casemate. The elephant at once showed that he perceived ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... colour; so that his compositions have sometimes almost a Titianesque look in this particular. This innovation was a healthy one, and led to very noble results when followed up by succeeding artists: but in many of Giotto's compositions the figures become ludicrously cumbrous, from the exceeding simplicity of the terminal lines, and massiveness of unbroken form. The manner was copied in illuminated manuscripts with great disadvantage, as it was unfavourable to minute ornamentation. The French never adopted it in either branch of art, nor did any other Northern ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... the blaze of the setting sun, like so many burnished mirrors. Then came Cromwell's own carriage, drawn by four strong black horses;—they had need of strength, dragging, as they did, a weight of plated iron, of which the cumbrous machine was composed. The windows were remarkably narrow, and formed of the thickest glass, within which was a layer of horn, that, if it were shattered by any rude assault, would prevent the fragments from flying to the inside. Behind this ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... so simple and stenographic that the fathers often use it as a rapid way of writing French. It has, however, the disadvantage of ambiguity at times. Any Indian boy can learn it in a week or two; practically all the Indians use it. What a commentary on our own cumbrous and illogical spelling, which takes even a bright child two or three ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... royalty as to behold without some shame a noble lady at our feet. Nay, thou art pale, very pale; thy coming hither hath been too rapid, too hurried for thy strength, methinks; I do beseech you, sit." Gently he raised her, and leading her gallantly to one of the cumbrous couches near them, placed her upon it, and sat down beside her. "Ha! that is well; thou art better now. Knowest thou, Mary, thine office would have been more wisely performed, hadst thou presented me to the Countess of ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... are the Dutch troops, who are under the immediate command of the Commander-in-Chief, the Prince of Orange. The English volunteers being the next to the Prince's regiment of Guards, followed close upon the main body of the army, and behind them trailed the long, cumbrous baggage train. The rear-guard, together with some details of various kinds and nations, consisted of the Spanish division, which was commanded by Prince Vaudemont. As they came to higher ground Claverhouse began to see the lie of the country, and to ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... the slinking bootleggers of the town, a score or more of whom are known to make money by this liquor peddling, and some of whom do nothing else for a living, yet whom it is next to impossible to convict, owing to the cumbrous machinery of the law and the attitude of juries, and it will be seen that the hands of those who are fighting for the native ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... Here we entered a palace, of roughed stone blocks after the ancient Florentine style, where a splendid porter with cocked hat, a silver-headed baton, and gorgeous livery kept guard. Up the white marble stairs, into stately halls overladen with gilding, the walls crowded with paintings in cumbrous but resplendent frames. Prince So-and-So had got into financial difficulties, and wanted to part with some of ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... gurgles the quiet winding stream, and far away comes the din and hum of active life, thronged with the busy crowd whose restless feet are bearing them swiftly on to the end of life's journey, where they must resign the cumbrous load and "join the pale caravan in ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... to learn what it meant to be entangled in an intricate clumsy old machine, incredibly cumbrous and at the same time incredibly powerful, jolting along with its absurd forms and abominable English towards an end which might or might not be just, but was most certainly ruinously expensive. The game began by a direct letter from the Queen, of ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... should be composed of rude fragments, such as the giant of the Peak would step upon, that he might not be wetshod. The expense of the works now carrying on will amount to forty thousand pounds. A heavy quadrangle of stables is part of the plan, is very cumbrous, and standing higher than the house, is ready to overwhelm it. The principal front of the house is beautiful, and executed with the neatness of wrought plate; the inside is most sumptuous, but did not please ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... left them to breed conviction. If they gave them entrance and cherished them, they would soon find how full of primary truth they were, and how well they would serve them, as they had served him. With all this heavy artillery, somewhat slow and cumbrous, on great questions, he had no want, when he was speaking off-hand, of quick, snell remark, often witty and full of spirit, and often too unexpected, like lightning—flashing, smiting, and gone. In Church Courts this was very marked. On small ordinary matters, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... the effect which has been again and again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful simmer of many-hued significance, no hoary Archaisms "familiar with forgotten years"—a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language may be ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... revered abroad; Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, "An honest man's the noblest work of God:"[30] And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordling's pomp! a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way possible. He never studied mathematics in order to make progress in his knowledge of the science, but simply for purely practical everyday work; as long as his knowledge enabled him to obtain results ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... at Gaza for two or three days more, and he wanted me to become his guest. I persuaded him, however, that it would be better for him to let me depart at once. He wanted to add to my baggage a roast lamb and a quantity of other cumbrous viands, but I escaped with half a horse-load of leaven bread, which was very good of its kind, and proved a most useful present. The air with which the Governor’s slaves affected to be almost breaking down under the ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... plays then current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly a sample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these. The poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clip the cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seed and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteen weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling lines which had hitherto done duty ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of complacent satisfaction was indulged in over the advantages likely to result from such rapid travelling. This great speed, however, was made to appear quite slow in the first half of the nineteenth century when locomotives were invented capable of covering sixty miles an hour. Nowadays the old cumbrous locomotive, rumbling and puffing along and making only sixty miles in sixty minutes, is a very dilatory machine in comparison with our light and beautiful rocket cars, which frequently dart through the air at the ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... And thus the listening throng address'd. 'Goodness, how abject is our race, Condemn'd to slavery and disgrace! Shall we our servitude retain, Because our sires have borne the chain? Consider, friends! your strength and might; 'Tis conquest to assert your right. How cumbrous is the gilded coach! The pride of man is our reproach. Were we design'd for daily toil, To drag the ploughshare through the soil, To sweat in harness through the road, To groan beneath the carrier's load? How feeble are the two-legg'd kind! What force is in our nerves combin'd! Shall ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... answering elaborate letters from the official personages in the next building. The company officers and men were assigned their regular hours for drill, as well as for everything else that men could think of doing in barracks. In short, we found ourselves all drawn into the operations of a vast, cumbrous, slow-moving machine, with a great many more cogs than drivers, through which no regiment or any other body could pass rapidly. The time required in our case was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... disappointments? I had gone through the list with her, selecting just the right people to be asked to meet the Landors, our new neighbors. Not a mere cumbrous county gathering, nor yet a showy imported party from town, but a skillful blending of both. Had anything happened already? I had been late for dinner and missed the arrivals in the drawing-room. It ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... never seen any conveyance at once so light and handsome, the cumbrous coaches of the times being little to his liking. He had always travelled afoot or on horseback hitherto, and he had expected to do the same now, when he received his summons ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... from which, however, I started as the old clock struck two from a turret adjoining to my bedchamber. I instantly arose, struck a light, wrote the letter I proposed to leave for my uncle, and leaving behind me such articles of dress as were cumbrous in carriage, I deposited the rest of my wardrobe in my valise, glided down stairs, and gained the stable without impediment. Without being quite such a groom as any of my cousins, I had learned at Osbaldistone Hall to dress ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... consequently, introduced so much confusion into their mythology, that philosophers rejected the entire system. This circumstance greatly facilitated the progress of Christianity, whose beautiful simplicity furnished a powerful contrast to the confused and cumbrous mass of divinities, worshipped in the time ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... sons was William D., who was born in New Orleans in 1809, but was educated in the North and was appointed to the navy when fourteen years old. He was placed in command of a cumbrous ironclad constructed from a ferryboat at the beginning of the war and named the Essex, in honor of the famous cruiser with which his father played havoc with the shipping of Great Britain in the Pacific. In the attack on Fort Henry, in February, 1862, ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... were placed. Ney's had just received its tribute of a beautiful garland of blue cornflowers: and the other a Chaplet of Honeysuckle. By both graves were weeping willows. Mr. Sotheby's friend, the poet Delille,[125] sleeps beneath a cumbrous mass of marble, within which his wife immerses herself once a week, to manifest sorrow for one whose incessant tormentor I am told she was during his life. The inscriptions were for the most part commonplace. I copied out a few of the best. I was sorry to observe ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... that belonged to Scarba," she said, and then she sang, simply and pathetically enough, the somewhat stiff and cumbrous English translation of the Gaelic words. It was the song of the exiled Mary Macleod, who, sitting on the shores of "sea-worn Mull," looks abroad on the lonely islands of Scarba, and Islay, and Jura, and laments that she is far away from her ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... graceful folds a coeur sentimentally ruled the day,—now infant waists became a passion, and the most maternal forms aped the juvenility borrowed from their babies. Then for sleeves: at one time they were wide and long and cumbrous, forbidding every trace of the most rounded member beneath; then they took the form of antique drapery, disclosing the arm almost nude, save for the transparent lace of the undersleeve,—then ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... who she is," replied that practical young lady, as she placed the heavy key in the cumbrous lock, "and I shall also take leave to inform her that this bit of coast ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... form cabins. The bulwarks were high and surrounded with large round shields of wood, and leather, and brass knobs, and curious devices painted on them. The anchors were curious contrivances, made of some hard wood, very large and cumbrous, the flukes only being tipped with iron. Outside at the bows was a wonderfully awkward-looking winch for getting up the anchor; and as Jack observed, when he came to be made Lord High Admiral of the Chinese fleet, there were a good many things he saw that he ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... cumbrous ceremonial of the Roman Church, on the ground that it was not only overloaded with superfluous ornament, but too fatally disfigured by irrational, superstitious, or impious observances to be susceptible ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... and indescribably absurd use of Law-Latin in records, writs, and written pleadings, was finally put an end to by statute 4 George II. c. 26; but this bill, which discarded for legal processes a cumbrous and harsh language, that was alike unmusical and inexact, and would have been utterly unintelligible to a Roman gentleman of the Augustan period, did not become law without much opposition from some of the authorities of Westminster Hall. Lord Raymond, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... chance to words formed out of English material. Such new English words, especially new English compounds, need, it would seem, to be used for some little time before we can overcome our dislike of them, while terms of Greek and Latin origin, however cumbrous and unsuitable they may be, are accepted almost without question. We would discourage such unimaginative and artificial formations, and on principle prefer terms made of English material, which are easily understood and ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 1 (Oct 1919) • Society for Pure English
... phrase "standing before the eyes of a country," which is the real meaning of "patria coram"; it is akin to "looking a matter in the face," which is met with,—(and which I almost deem elegant,)— in the cumbrous oratory of Lord Castlereagh, but which I should be very much astonished to discover had originated from the lips of another statesman, the very opposite in speech of the renowned Foreign Secretary,—the ornate and correct rhetorician, so famed for the concinnity of his ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the saluting party returned to their occupation, and the stuffing and sewing were soon afterwards finished, when Fairway harnessed a horse, wrapped up the cumbrous present, and drove off with it in the cart to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the case with the tenant of a large cumbrous carriage, which, drawn heavily on by four stout horses wended slowly on the King's Highway, not very far from the spot where the wooden gates that we have described raised their white faces by the side ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... him,—why, then, England might have been a Christian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, 'Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;'—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all men ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... establishment of superfluous officials. The royal household was a complex 'body corporate' founded in the old days of 'purveyance.' There was the mysterious 'Board of Green Cloth' formed by the great officers and supposed to have judicial as well as administrative functions. Cumbrous mediaeval machinery thus remained which had been formed in the time when the distinction between a public trust and private property was not definitely drawn or which had been allowed to remain for the sake of patronage, when its functions had been transferred ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Had England rallied all round him,—why, then, England might have been a Christian land! As it is, vulpine knowingness sits yet at its hopeless problem, 'Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;'—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... his head, He quiver'd with his feet, and lay for dead. Black was his countenance in a little space, For all the blood was gather'd in his face. Help was at hand: they rear'd him from the ground, And from his cumbrous arms his limbs unbound; Then lanced a vein, and watch'd returning breath; It came, but clogg'd with symptoms of his death. 710 The saddle-bow the noble parts had press'd, All bruised and mortified his manly breast. Him ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... before been despised by the farmer and the trader as fit only "for women in childbed," were now in general use. Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their carved staircases, their quaintly-figured gables, not only contrasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to play its ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... worker, and every one a serious politician. There are no drones, and none who spend their lives in the pleasures, refinements, luxuries, vices, the idle amusements of the great cities of Europe. The buildings represent utility, means fairly adapted to ends, but with no cumbrous decoration or ponderous display. These capitals are bureaucratic settlements, devoted to the deliberate ends of national government with a minimum of waste, strictly appropriated to use alone, rendering their service to the nation as a counting-house ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... devil's caps, woollen sashes of great length for winding around the body, and, after long search, leather Russian boots lined with sheepskin and reaching half-way up the thigh. When rigged out in this costume, my diameter was about equal to half my height, and I found locomotion rather cumbrous; while Braisted, whose stature is some seven inches shorter, waddled ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... male, These Feminine. For Spirits when they please Can either Sex assume, or both; so soft And uncompounded is their Essence pure, Not ti'd or manacl'd with joynt or limb, Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure, Can execute their aerie purposes, 430 And works of love or enmity fulfill. For those the Race of Israel oft forsook Their living strength, and unfrequented left His righteous Altar, bowing lowly down To bestial Gods; ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Urn Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly Latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, that stately, cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had something of the flow and measure of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing. Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily interests of men. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... with his cumbrous brood, That scared the world?—By this sharp scythe they fell, And half the sky was curdled with their blood: So have all primal giants sigh'd farewell. No wardens now by sedgy fountains dwell, Nor pearly Naiads. All their days are done That strove with Time, untimely, to excel; Wherefore ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... invited to inspect Hogarth's painting-room—a mere loft, of most limited dimensions, over the stable, which the imagination could easily furnish with the necessary easel, or still less cumbrous graver's implements. It is situated at the furthest part of the garden from the house; a small door in the garden-wall leads into a little inclosure, one side of which is occupied by the stable. The painting-room is over the stable, and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... a few others among the provincials, the whole, from general to drummer-boy, were total strangers to that insidious warfare of the forest in which their enemies, red and white, had no rival. Instead of marching, like Braddock, at one stretch for Fort Duquesne, burdened with a long and cumbrous baggage-train, it was the plan of Forbes to push on by slow stages, establishing fortified magazines as he went, and at last, when within easy distance of the fort, to advance upon it with all his force, as little impeded as possible with wagons and packhorses. ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... hundred years, (i. e. since the close of Edward II., or beginning of Edward III., A. D. 1327;) and its venerable but tortuous fiction has been scarcely even touched by the "amending hand," which lately (1834) cut away so many cumbrous, complicated, and quasi obsolete portions of the law of action, (see Stat. 3 and 4 Will. 4, c. 27, Sec. 36.) The progress of this action is calculated to throw much light on some of our early history and jurisprudence. See an interesting sketch of it in the first chapter ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... strengthened by several iron bolts or rods which passed through just under some of the rungs. One side of the ladder had an iron band or ribbon twisted and nailed round it spirally. It was not at all suitable for painters' work, being altogether too heavy and cumbrous. However, as none of the others were long enough to reach the high gable at the Refuge, they managed, with a struggle, to get it down from the hooks and put it on one of the handcarts and soon passed through the streets of mean and dingy houses in the ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... complex 'body corporate' founded in the old days of 'purveyance.' There was the mysterious 'Board of Green Cloth' formed by the great officers and supposed to have judicial as well as administrative functions. Cumbrous mediaeval machinery thus remained which had been formed in the time when the distinction between a public trust and private property was not definitely drawn or which had been allowed to remain for the sake of patronage, when its functions had been transferred to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... and sustained elegance made it a sort of canon of poetical technique. Among much tedious rhetoric and cumbrous mythology there is enough imagination and pathos to make the poem interesting and ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... Further on these protuberances rising sharply, formed the first steps of the great Alps. From this time their course was a continual ascent, as was soon evident in the strain it made on the bullocks to drag along the cumbrous wagon. Their yoke creaked, they breathed heavily, and the muscles of their houghs were stretched as if they would burst. The planks of the vehicle groaned at the unexpected jolts, which Ayrton with all his skill could not ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... have occurred to him to relieve Juliet of a cumbrous piece of baggage, but he instinctively took it from Isabel. "Come on," he said. "We've got to hurry if we don't ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... from the Spaniards (see p. 100 of the Rudimentos del rabe vulgar que se habla en el imperio de Marruccos por El P. Fr. Jos de Lerchundi, Madrid 1872): This lack of the higher numerals, the reverse of the Hindu languages, makes Arabic "arithmology" very primitive and almost as cumbrous as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... supported by four pairs of wheels, which had been constructed for its reception. A barrel of water, placed on another frame upon wheels, was attached to it as a tender. After a great deal of labour, the cumbrous machine was got upon the road. At first it would not move an inch. Its maker, Tommy Waters, became impatient, and at length enraged, and taking hold of the lever of the safety valve, declared in his desperation, ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... her reward. Betty would offer Molly all sorts of small temptations to neglect Miss Eyre's wishes; Molly steadily resisted, and plodded away at her task of sewing or her difficult sum. Betty made cumbrous jokes at Miss Eyre's expense. Molly looked up with the utmost gravity, as if requesting the explanation of an unintelligible speech; and there is nothing so quenching to a wag as to be asked to translate his jest into plain matter-of-fact ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Chinese had been tumbling down all sorts of missiles; but when the Allies were once upon the walls, the great body of them retired. They poured down into the city, and fired from the streets; they dodged behind the buildings on the ramparts, and thence took aim with their cumbrous matchlocks. A few single encounters occurred, and Major Luard's revolver disposed of one lingerer; but the Allies generally fired right and left, and pushed on to the right, so as to sweep the wall upwards ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... simple arithmetical examples and several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way possible. He never studied mathematics in order to make progress in his knowledge of the science, but simply for purely practical everyday work; as long as his knowledge enabled him to obtain results which he knew from experience ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... in pursuit numbered just ten persona including the king, Ziffak, Waggaman, and the very pick of the tribe. They were all splendid fellows, fit to be the body-guard of a king, who, when he laid aside the robes of cumbrous dress he was accustomed to wear, and arrayed himself similarly to the warriors, proved himself no mean leader ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... cushioned, always within call, and governed by a beneficently trifling tariff. These vinaigrettes, as they are called, would be appreciated at home, if habit took kindly to novelties. How greatly they might simplify problems of calling and shopping! Our conveyances are all cumbrous. We must have the huge barouche, the coach, the close-shut coupe. Even the phaeton yields to the high T-cart. But convention is autocratic, and would frown on these vinaigrettes as it frowns on many useful ideas. Another unfortunate victim of its taboo is the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... longing for the polar night, for the everlasting wonderland of the stars with the spectral northern lights, and the moon sailing through the profound silence. It is like a dream, like a glimpse into the realms of fantasy. There are no forms, no cumbrous reality—only a vision woven of silver and violet ether, rising up from earth and floating out into infinity.... But this eternal day, with its oppressive actuality, interests me no longer—does not entice me out of my lair. Life is one incessant ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... upon seals, think it sufficient to catch and bring them on shore; and would rather submit to starve than assist their women in skinning, dressing, or dragging home the cumbrous ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... slow or cumbrous about Annie. These thoughts had flashed through her mind during the brief moment in which her eyes softened from surprise into sympathy as they caught the expression of Gregory's face. Then, fearing to disturb him, with silent tread she passed out ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... indescribably absurd use of Law-Latin in records, writs, and written pleadings, was finally put an end to by statute 4 George II. c. 26; but this bill, which discarded for legal processes a cumbrous and harsh language, that was alike unmusical and inexact, and would have been utterly unintelligible to a Roman gentleman of the Augustan period, did not become law without much opposition from some of the authorities of Westminster Hall. Lord Raymond, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... tenderness. As to style, the American far exceeds the Englishman. A certain conventional artifice and dainty affectation clouded the clear and beautiful nature of Sidney, when he wrote. The elaborate embroidery of thought, the stiff and cumbrous Elizabethan dress of language, with all its ruffles and laces, make the "Arcadia" an imperfect exponent of Sidney's nature. His intense thoughts, delicate emotions, and burning passions are half concealed in the form he adopts for their expression. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... the stately thoroughfare had given place to a meaner street, its princely shops had degenerated into blank walls or grimy yards, on either hand rose tall chimney stacks belching smoke; instead of dashing motor cars, heavy wains and cumbrous wagons jogged by; in place of the well-dressed throng were figures rough-clad and grimy that hurried along the narrow sidewalks—but these rough-clad people walked fast and purposefully. So we hummed along streets wide or narrow but always grimy, until ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... is still more cumbrous. It consists of the days of the week written in succession from 1 to 13, underneath these the 20 signs of days, and underneath these again another series of 9 signs; so that each day was distinguished by a combination of a number and two ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... those insects open and close their wings no less than two hundred times in a second. It is amazing. And is it not suggestive of the capacity of motion with which this body may easily be endowed when the cumbrous flesh is changed into the immortal, ethereal body? Since those tiny insects are so wonderfully endowed for their little life here, so aimless as it might seem, what glorious capacities may not be in reserve for us, God's redeemed children, who are to live ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... observed something like a black cloud against the dark sky. Being always on the alert for squalls, I ran to the bow. There could be no doubt it was a squall, and as I listened I thought I heard the murmur of the coming gale. Instantly I began to work might and main at my cumbrous tackle for shortening sail, and in the course of an hour and a half had the most of it reduced—the topsail yards down on the caps, the topsails clewed up, the sheets hauled in, the main and fore peaks lowered, and the flying-jib down. While thus engaged, the ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... whole affair quite comfortably. The gendarme shut the carriage door with a bang, and at my request gave the order to the driver to proceed. The latter once again cracked his whip, and once again the cumbrous vehicle, after an awkward lurch, rattled on its way along the cobblestones ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... statement. Some have not scrupled to argue that it covers the entire cost of the war; for, they point out, the entire cost of the war has to be met by taxation, and such taxation is "damaging to the civilian population." They admit that the phrase is cumbrous, and that it would have been simpler to have said "all loss and expenditure of whatever description"; and they allow that the apparent emphasis of damage to the persons and property of civilians ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... they were light cars, on two wheels, constructed to carry only one person; invented, it is supposed, by the Belgians, and by them introduced into Britain, where they were used in war. The Romans, after their expeditions in Gaul and Britain, adopted this useful vehicle instead of their more cumbrous RHEDA, not only for journeys where dispatch was required, but in solemn processions, and for ordinary purposes. They seem to have become the fashion, for Ovid tells us that these little carriages were driven by young ladies, themselves holding ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... up everywhere, opening all roads; travellers pass through the stations from all points of the compass—cattle buyers, drovers, station-owners, telegraph people—all bent on business, and all glad to get moving after the long compulsory inaction of the Wet; and lastly that great yearly cumbrous event takes place: the starting of the "waggons," with ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... the great officers of state, the autos were performed; the giants made sport for the multitude, and the entertainment concluded with music and dancing. Sometimes the procession was headed by the figure of a monster called the Tarasca, half serpent in form, borne by men concealed in its cumbrous bulk, and surmounted by another figure representing the woman of Babylon, —all so managed as to fill with wonder and terror the country people who crowded round it, and whose hats and caps were generally snatched away by the grinning ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Logic most helpful for this purpose, in throwing light upon many of the obscurities with which Formal Logic abounds, and in furnishing a delightfully easy method of testing the results arrived at by the cumbrous processes which Formal Logic enforces upon ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... word school, because "little children, especially those under six, do not need to be schooled and taught, what they need is opportunity for development." He had great difficulty in selecting a name. Those originally suggested were somewhat cumbrous, e.g. Institution for the Promotion of Spontaneous Activity in Children; another was Self-Teaching Institution, and there was also the one which Madame Michaelis translated "Nursery School for ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... military conduct of affairs, there is no doubt of the value, or of the unflagging energy, of the naval support given. Sir William Howe alludes to it frequently, both in general and specifically; while the Admiral sums up his always guarded and often cumbrous expressions of opinion in these words: "It is incumbent upon me to represent to your Lordships, and I cannot too pointedly express, the unabating perseverance and alacrity with which the several classes of officers and seamen have supported a long attendance and ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... where the great fleets operated in the later days of William III., and the reign of Anne. Then, too, the heavy ships, like land armies, went into winter quarters. It was by distinguished admirals considered professionally criminal to expose those huge yet cumbrous engines of the nation's power to the buffetings of winter gales, which might unfit them next year to meet the enemy, snugly nursed and restored to vigor in home ports during the same time. The need of periodical refitting and cleaning the bottoms ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... could be recruited among the peasantry. There was, however, an entire absence of any arms save pikes. Harry knew how good a weapon are these when used by steady and well-disciplined men. The matchlocks of those days were cumbrous arms, and it was at the point of the pike that battles were ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... in, a gentlemanly manner for having for a moment deviated from the forma of his imposed situation. All, the gossips of Paris were presently amused with the story, which, of coarse, reached the Court, with every droll particular of the pulling up and clapping down the cumbrous paraphernalia ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... ninth or tenth of July, in the afternoon; and the day being very sultry, the heat had oppressed me with langour, and I was all day as one laden with sleep. But no sooner had Mrs Aird told me this, than I felt the langour depart from me, as if a cumbrous cloak had been taken away, and I rose up a recruited and reanimated man. It was so much the end of my debility of body and sorrowing of mind, that she was loquacious with her surprise when she saw me, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... yet introduced into most gymnasiums, in spite of the recommendations of the Roxbury Hercules: beside the fear of straining, there is the cumbrous weight and cost of iron apparatus, while, for some reason or other, no cheap and accurate dynamometer has yet come into the market. Running and jumping, also, have as yet been too much neglected in our institutions, or practised spasmodically rather than systematically. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... slight noise and breaking off her reading turned to look. Hamilton made another effort to enter before he recollected that the wooden key, or notched lever, that controlled the cumbrous wooden lock, hung on a peg beside the door. He felt for it along the wall, and soon laid his hand on it. Then again he peeped through to see Alice, who was now standing upright near the swivel. She had thrown her hair back from ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... every few minutes some utterly incongruous and frequently worthless article, and begging her to put it in at once, whatever she might be packing. Any one who has ever packed for a long journey, with an eager and excited child running up every minute with more and more cumbrous toys, dogs, cats, Noah's arks, and so on, to be put in among books and under-clothing, can imagine Mercy's despair at her ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... conical hill, on the summit of which a look-out tower had been erected; this building was in troublesome times occupied by a party of Juzzylchees, who took their station in it, and, fixing their cumbrous pieces on the parapet, watched the approach of any hostile party, and from their commanding and protected position would be enabled to keep in check an enemy attempting to ascend the opposite side of the hill. As the nearest stream of water was full two miles from the fort, the present owner, ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... committee of 17 plenipotentiaries, each of the larger States having one, and several of the smaller being united in the choice of one. The army of the Confederation was fixed, in 1830, at 303,484 men, to be furnished by the States in a fixed proportion. The inconveniences of this cumbrous organization are apparent. One member might be at war with any power, while the others were at peace: thus the Confederation took no part in the Italian and Hungarian warfare against Austria, for it guaranteed to her only the possession ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... reading their Cicero. A rap at the door seemed a rude interruption; yet so unusual was the excitement of an evening visitor that they could not be quite indifferent to the event,—the less so when the visitor proved to be Polly's client of the cumbrous income. ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... one time, they carried a meaning which they have lost. Yet we are not worse than our fathers before us, and are not exceeded in the milk of human kindness. It may be that the old form was such a cumbrous piece of hypocrisy that latter-day people have thrown it off in disgust. Anyway, there is nothing more certain nor more astonishing than that a well man cannot conceive the feelings of a sick man, even though he try, and that those who are sick have to grin and bear it all ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... this place, and I was obliged to go about the streets with my cumbrous equipage in search of a lodging; but as no one would receive a Christian, not from any want of good nature, but in consequence of an erroneous religious opinion that a house which has been visited by an unbeliever is defiled. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... one sixth of a dollar; in New York to one eighth; in North Carolina to one tenth. It was partly for this reason that in devising a national coinage the more uniform dollar was adopted as the unit. At the same time the decimal system of division was adopted instead of the cumbrous English system, and the result was our present admirably simple currency, which we owe to Gouverneur Morris, aided as to some points by Thomas Jefferson. During the period of the Confederation, the chaotic state of the currency was a serious obstacle to trade, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... next day, as it chanced, our English companions broke the axle-tree of their wagon, and down came the whole cumbrous machine lumbering into the bed of a brook! Here was a day's work cut out for us. Meanwhile, our emigrant associates kept on their way, and so vigorously did they urge forward their powerful oxen that, with the broken axle-tree and other calamities, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... there was, I suspect, a whole class of plays then current, and more or less supported by popular favour, of which hardly a sample is now extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these. The poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to clip the cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all to seed and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of fourteen weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and sprawling lines which had hitherto done duty ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... singular habiliments with much of the curiosity with which an antiquary would survey a suit of chain armour; the long epaulettes of yellow cotton cord, the heavy belt with its brass buckle, the cumbrous boots, plaited and bound with iron like churns were in rather a ludicrous contrast to the equipment of our light and jockey-like boys in nankeen jackets and neat tops, that spin ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, "An honest man's the noblest work of God;" And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, The cottage leaves the palace far behind; What is a lordling's pomp? a cumbrous load, Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, Studied in arts of ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Reichel, says that "the use of the Mycenaean shield is inconsistent with that of the metal breastplate; "the shield" covers the wearer in a way which makes a breastplate an useless encumbrance; or rather, it is ignorance of the breastplate which alone can explain the use of such frightfully cumbrous gear as the huge shield." [Footnote: Classical Review, ix. p. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... trade's unfeeling train Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain; Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose. 1939 GOLDSMITH: Des. Village, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... to the proper names involved, I have preferred to use modern forms rather than the cumbrous if more correct spelling of the period. The name of the terrible queen, for example, appears on her coins as "Cynethryth," and varies in the pages of the chroniclers from "Quendred" to the form chosen ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... from on high to direct us, strength commensurate with our task to support us, and the beauty of holiness to adorn and render all our performances acceptable in Thy sight. And when our work is done, and our bodies mingle with the mother earth, may our souls, disengaged from their cumbrous dust, flourish and bloom in eternal day; and enjoy that rest which Thou hast prepared for all good and faithful servants, in that spiritual house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, through ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... to you as now travelling the downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my intention. If in some respects it is losing, in others it is gaining. Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this too, the parting with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. English is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only different in that it is passing into another stage of its development; only different, as the fruit is different from the flower, and the flower from the bud; ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... way,' he remarked, when the boy told him he was ready. And with his cumbrous and uneasy action he stiffly offered her his arm. Her hand was just within it, when she drew it back. He looked round with a start, as if he thought she had detected something that repelled her, in the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... family party set forward on their journey. They went in advance of the caravan so as not to be hindered and inconvenienced by its slow and cumbrous movements. A ride of three miles through the old forest brought them to the open, hilly country. Here the road forked. And here the family ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... immediate use. Books in several volumes should have the number of each volume plainly marked in Arabic (not Roman) numerals on the back. The old-fashioned method of expressing numerals by letters, instead of figures, is too cumbrous and time-consuming to be tolerated. You want to letter, we will say, vol. 88 of Blackwood's Magazine. If you follow the title-page of that book, as printed, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... almost completely replaced the wet cell in this country, and as a result, the general type of wall set as shown in Figs. 142 and 143, has gradually replaced the old wet-cell type, which was more cumbrous and unsightly. It is usual on wall sets to provide some sort of a shelf, as indicated in Fig. 142, for the convenience of the user in ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... and overwhelming popularity of part singing soon, as we have seen, relegated the first suggestions of a manner of setting vocal solos for the stage into a position of comparative obscurity and in the end this possibility was conquered by the cumbrous method of Vecchi. Perhaps the unsuitability of polyphonic composition might have made itself clear earlier than it did, had not the general state of Italian thought and taste moved in a direction making this impossible. The noble ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... positively masculine articles, but were nevertheless made by a man's boot-maker, and there was only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently ugly to suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy, thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed and disfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep. Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as it was, was so by malice prepense on her part. And whereas the general result would have suggested ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... little farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies of "Seventy-fives." Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always attended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giant gazelles feeding among elephants; and the stables of woven pine-boughs which stood near by might have been the huge huts of ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the timbers I could view the country beneath me, far and wide. I saw near at hand the cumbrous gate of the stockade ajar, and at a little distance on the farther side Mr. Gulliver and his half-human servant standing. In front of them was an empty space—a narrow semicircle of which Gulliver was the ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... brood Bay his mild radiance, impotent and fell; Calm in his halls of brightness he shall dwell! 5 For lo! RELIGION at his strong behest Starts with mild anger from the Papal spell, And flings to Earth her tinsel-glittering vest, Her mitred State and cumbrous Pomp unholy; And JUSTICE wakes to bid th' Oppressor wail 10 Insulting aye the wrongs of patient Folly; And from her dark retreat by Wisdom won Meek NATURE slowly lifts her matron veil To smile with fondness on ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... setting sun, like so many burnished mirrors. Then came Cromwell's own carriage, drawn by four strong black horses;—they had need of strength, dragging, as they did, a weight of plated iron, of which the cumbrous machine was composed. The windows were remarkably narrow, and formed of the thickest glass, within which was a layer of horn, that, if it were shattered by any rude assault, would prevent the fragments from flying to the inside. Behind this carriage rode four mounted soldiers; ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... of husbands. Now, although we are inclined to think that these are greatly exaggerated, and that married men are, on the whole, very good—excellent men and citizens, brave men, battling with the world and its difficulties, and carrying forward the cumbrous machine in its path of progress and civilization—although we think that, as a class, their merits are actually not fully appreciated, and that the bachelors (sly fellows!) get very much the best of it—still, we must admit that there is a very large class of thoroughly bad ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... adventurers were too late. Every railway station and post-office within twenty miles was already held by troops. Revolts are conducted scientifically in that region. Their stage management is perfect, and the cumbrous methods of effete civilizations might well take note of the speed, thoroughness, and efficiency with which a change of government ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... possession or the use of anything that can be really called the mathematical faculty, the exercise of which in any broad sense has only been possible since the introduction of the decimal notation. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Jews, and the Chinese had all such cumbrous systems, that anything like a science of arithmetic, beyond very simple operations, was impossible; and the Roman system, by which the year 1888 would be written MDCCCLXXXVIII, was that in common use in Europe down to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, and even much later ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the Commons unanimously determined to treat the offences which the Committee had brought to light as high crimes against the State, and to employ against a few cunning mercers in Nicholas Lane and the Old Jewry all the gorgeous and cumbrous machinery which ought to be reserved for the delinquencies of great Ministers and Judges. It was resolved, without a division, that several Frenchmen and one Englishman who had been deeply concerned in the contraband trade should be impeached. Managers were appointed; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lance. At one end an enormous pair of antlers were inserted in the wall, the branches serving as hooks on which to suspend hats, whips, and spurs, and in the corners of the apartment were fowling-pieces, fishing-rods, and other sporting implements. The furniture was of the cumbrous workmanship of former days, though some articles of modern convenience had been added and the oaken floor had been carpeted, so that the whole presented an odd ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the wool takes up more room than the gold. No, Sir; I always thought Robertson would be crushed by his own weight,—would be buried under his own ornaments. Goldsmith tells you shortly all you want to know: Robertson detains you a great deal too long. No man will read Robertson's cumbrous detail a second time; but Goldsmith's plain narrative will please again and again. I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: "Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... stenographic that the fathers often use it as a rapid way of writing French. It has, however, the disadvantage of ambiguity at times. Any Indian boy can learn it in a week or two; practically all the Indians use it. What a commentary on our own cumbrous and illogical spelling, which takes even a bright child two or three ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... field. By accompanying the soldiers, he was able to gain a variety of advantages. He was at hand to sanction what steps might be necessary, an advance on cumbrous despatch writing. His presence was especially valuable when sea and land forces happened to be co-operating. He could order both, being Governor, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, and everything else, in New Zealand. Finally, he could speak, face to face, with the Maoris, friends and enemies ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... case declined at once; but when congregations, in spite of him or without having previously consulted him, took the responsibility of proceeding to a formal call, he never intervened to arrest their action. He had a curious respect for the somewhat cumbrous and slow-moving Presbyterian procedure, and when it had been set in motion he felt that it was his duty to let ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... same way, I have known an illiterate Englishman speak of Aix-la-Chapelle as Hexley Chapel. To the name, thus distorted, our forefathers of course added the generic word for a Roman town, and so made the cumbrous title of Eoforwic-ceaster, which is the almost universal form in the earlier parts of the English Chronicle. This was too much of a mouthful even for the hardy Anglo-Saxon, so we soon find a disposition to shorten it into Ceaster ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... to all strangers, but more so from the novelty and singularity of its construction than from its beauty. Utility rather than elegance was consulted by the builder. This far-famed structure is ugly and cumbrous, and a passenger feels a very unpleasing sensation if he happens to stand upon it when a loaded waggon drives along it at low water, at which time there is a considerable descent from the side of the suburbs. An undulatory motion is then occasioned, which goes on gradually from ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... measures eighty-two feet; to the top of the dome two hundred and ten feet. When completed, the building will be surmounted by a large dome, giving a general resemblance to the main portion of the Capitol at Washington. The dome, viewed from the rear, appears something heavy and cumbrous for the general character of the structure which it crowns; but a front view, from Chambers street, when the eye, in its upward sweep, takes in the broad flight of steps, the grand columns, and the general robustness of the main entrance, dissipates this idea, and attaches grace ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... There must also be quantity, which is necessary in prose as well as in verse: clauses, sentences, paragraphs, must be in due proportion. Metre and even rhyme may be rarely admitted; though neither is a legitimate element of prose writing, they may help to lighten a cumbrous expression (Symp.). The translation should retain as far as possible the characteristic qualities of the ancient writer—his freedom, grace, simplicity, stateliness, weight, precision; or the best ...
— Charmides • Plato
... world he cried, En garde! to the King of Spain. There, ordering out his pinnaces in force, While a great storm, as if he held indeed Heaven's batteries in reserve, growled o'er the sea, He landed. Ere one cumbrous limb of all The monstrous armaments of Spain could move His ships were stored; and ere the sword of Spain Stirred in its crusted sheath, Bayona town Beheld an empty sea; for like a dream The pirate fleet had vanished, none knew whither. But, in its visible stead, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... taking with it a part of the fur on the thorax. The straw produces the same effects as the magnet, in other words, magnetism had nothing to do with what happened. My invention, in both cases alike, is a cumbrous tackle of which the Bee tries to rid herself at once by every possible means. To look to her for normal actions so long as she carries an apparatus, magnetized or not, upon her back is the same as expecting to study the natural habits of a Dog after tying ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... so also for letters the clay tablet was employed. It may seem to us indeed a somewhat cumbrous mode of sending a letter; but it had the advantage of being solid and less likely to be injured or destroyed than other writing materials. The characters upon it could not be obliterated by a shower of rain, and there was no danger of its being torn. Moreover, it must be remembered that the ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... conduct was not fully explained." For, surely, the "one idea or circumstance" of his "having acted in the manner in which he did act," may be quite as forcibly named by the one word conduct, as by all this verbiage, this "substantive phrase," or "entire clause," of such cumbrous length. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... style, where a splendid porter with cocked hat, a silver-headed baton, and gorgeous livery kept guard. Up the white marble stairs, into stately halls overladen with gilding, the walls crowded with paintings in cumbrous but resplendent frames. Prince So-and-So had got into financial difficulties, and wanted to part with some of ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... from his dress: a blue broadcloth coat with yellow gilt buttons; a swan's-down waistcoat with broad stripes of red and white; a pair of dove-coloured corded-velvet pantaloons with three large yellow buttons on the hips; and a neckcloth of fine white cam- bric.His figure was thickset, strong, cumbrous; his hair black, curly, shining. His eyes, bold, vivacious, and now inflamed, were of that rarely beautiful blue which is seen only in members of the Irish race. His complexion was a blending of the lily ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... being scooped out to receive them. And then Clara said, "If you wish me to live, take me from hence. There is something in this scene of transcendent beauty, in these trees, and hills and waves, that for ever whisper to me, leave thy cumbrous flesh, and make a part of us. I earnestly entreat you ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... assistance of the former we mould the latter into a thousand shapes of usefulness, neatness, and durability, and so much attached are we to this material, that it is daily superseding the use of the more cumbrous wood and stone, and other substances which were once in great demand. Iron furnishes most of the multifarious instruments required in the mechanical and agricultural arts—it ministers alike to war and to peace, by furnishing the sword and the ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... water-fiend," sneered Sir Bale, as he lay back in his cumbrous arm-chair. "Cheerful place, pleasant people, delicious fate! The place alone has been enough to set that fool out of his little senses, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... With this plan in view, Miss Sirwell collected the specimens from various schools of the State, supervised the erection of the booth, and installed the displays. As a result, the Minnesota exhibit had a distinct system and unity, was free from useless and cumbrous repetition, its main idea was readily grasped, and it stood as a memorable proof of one woman's artistic sense of proportion and adequacy. It was original in conception; it had beauty of color, ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... particularly, need a good, cheap, steam plow that can be made practicable for at least the better grade of farmers. The English plan of moldboards, that overcome all possible traction and necessitate the duplex stationary engines, with the cumbrous "artillery of attachments," may do for sluggish people but will never meet the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of my room open on purpose, so that he should know I was back there, and ready for him. I took down a long straight blade, like a rapier, with a basket hilt. It was a cumbrous weapon, and with a blunt edge; still, it had a point, and I was ready to thrust and parry against the world. I called upon my foes. No enemy appeared, and by the light of two candles, with a sword in my hand, I lost myself in the foreshadowings of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... your scheme for "boycotting" the Government of India under what seems to be the somewhat less offensive (though more cumbrous) name of non-co-operation; but have always given you credit for a genuine desire to carry out revolution by peaceful means and am astonished at the violence of the language you use in describing General Dyer on page 4 of your issue ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... ease; but he was readily circumvented in his design, finding to his cost that the English vessels could sail closer to the wind than his own, and could be manipulated more quickly, while their guns carried further. His cumbrous ships also were too much crowded with men, being fitter for transport than for action; the fighters were impeded by the press, and every effective shot from the enemy's guns found many victims. The English managed to keep at a distance while ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... the different regiments were distinguished by the colour of their sashes, which was the only point of regimental uniformity. When on a campaign doublets were usually worn of thick buff leather; armour was still used, but was far less cumbrous than it had been, consisting for the most part solely of shoulder pieces and cuirass, with plates covering the upper part of the arm, thick buff leather gauntlets being considered sufficient protection below ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... and he'll just tak ony thing, but most readily cattle, horse, or live Christians; for sheep are slow of travel, and inside plenishing is cumbrous to carry, and not easy to put away for siller ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... What sort of cumbrous and unmanageable machine, Sam Weller imagined a habeas-corpus to be, does not appear; for Perker, at that moment, walked up and ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... suppose that the system of Copernicus swept away the entire doctrine of epicycles; that doctrine can hardly be said to be swept away even now. As a description of a planet's motion it is not incorrect, though it is geometrically cumbrous. If you describe the motion of a railway train by stating that every point on the rim of each wheel describes a cycloid with reference to the earth, and a circle with reference to the train, and that the motion of the train is compounded of these cycloidal and circular ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... ale, foaming in the goblet; and so the stately banquet went on, with somewhat tedious magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness of sombre life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being assigned to it,—it being so much believed in,—it was indeed a feast. The cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding it heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ever blessed, The worlds late wonder, and the heavens new ioy; Live ever there, and leave me here distressed With mortall cares and cumbrous worlds anoy! 305 But, where thou dost that happines enioy, Bid me, O bid me quicklie come to thee, That happie there I ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... after his accession to the kingdom, attended only by some select courtiers, and without the cumbrous appendages of royalty, he left his capital upon a hunting excursion. In the course of the sport, passing over a desert plain, he came to a spot where was the opening of a cave, into which he entered, and observed domestic ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... could remember, or morbidly want to remember, the name unkindly given by Julius Caesar to Noyon, when he had besieged it. I can imagine even Charlemagne waving that cumbrous label impatiently aside, though Noyon mixed with Laon was his first capital. "Noviodunum Belgarum it may have been" (I dare say he said). "But I'm going to call ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... day how we used to peep through the crack of the door, or hold it half ajar and peer in, to watch his motions; and how mightily diverted we were with his deep, slow manner of speaking, his heavy, cumbrous walk, but, above all, with the wonderful faculty of "hemming" which ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in these pages. As my luck failed me at the last, I will place my loss at the full extent of the law, and claim that nothing less than a ten-pounder was spirited away from my hand that day. I might not have saved him, netless as I was upon my cumbrous raft; but I should at least have had the glory of the fight, and the ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... citizens of all classes had been at work; some upon the cumbrous engines, others carrying water, others levelling houses, but all their endeavours seemed powerless to quell the raging flames. And it was notable when first the pipes in the streets were opened, no water could be found, whereon ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... improve the apparatus and to augment its power, until it was finally able to yield a magneto-electric light comparable to that of the voltaic battery. Judged by later knowledge, this first machine would be considered cumbrous and defective in the extreme; but judged by the light of antecedent events, it marked ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... "The cumbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed Church and the highest ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... increase in our architectural proportions. With respect to personal ornaments also, ear-rings must not be so weighty as to tear the lobes of the ears; nor should a bracelet prevent, by its size, the motions of the arm. "Barbaric pomp and gold" is a fine thing; but a medallion, as heavy and as cumbrous as a shield, appended to a lady's bosom, would be any thing but a luxury. So, in the other extreme, a watch should not be so small as to render the dial-plate illegible; nor should a shoe be so tight as to lame its wearer for life. Beauty, it has been said, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... had practically ceased. The name of it last appears upon the statute book in the early years of the reign of Richard II., when the disputes between villains and their liege lords on their relative rights had furnished matter for cumbrous lawsuits, and by general consent the relation had merged of itself into a more liberal form. Thus serfdom had merged or was rapidly merging into free servitude; but it did not so merge that labouring men, if they pleased, were ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... fields precocious grass-blades peep Above the earth so lately wrapt in sleep. What sweet, elusive odor fills the soil, To rouse the farmer to his yearly toil! Though thick the clouds, and bare the maple bough, With what gay song he guides the cumbrous plough! In him there stirs, like sap within the tree, The joyous call to new activity: The outward scene, however dull and drear, Takes on a splendor from the inward cheer. Prophetic month! Would ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... preceding the King's carriage, wound down from the Citadel, groups of people cheered, and waved hats and handkerchiefs,—then, when his Majesty's own escort came into view, the cheering was redoubled,—and at last when the cumbrous, over- gilded, over-painted "Cinderella" State-coach appeared, and the familiar, but somewhat sternly-composed features of the King himself were perceived through the glass windows, a roar of acclamation, like the thundering ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... thundered the afternoon express from Paris, bearing the advance guard of the summer seekers after happiness. But if the cumbrous coaches carried swiftly onward some gay hearts, some young lovers to never-to-be-forgotten scenes, one there was among the throng to whom the world was gray—an English gentleman this, who gazed indifferently upon the bright vistas flitting past his window. The London Times reposed unopened by ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... heard from St. Vincent that a comparatively junior captain, Sir Sidney Smith, had been sent out by the Cabinet, bearing, besides his naval commission from the Admiralty, one from the Foreign Office as envoy to Turkey, conjointly with his brother, Spencer Smith. This unusual and somewhat cumbrous arrangement was adopted with the design that Smith should be senior naval officer in the Levant, where it was thought his hands would be strengthened by the diplomatic functions; but the Government's explanation of its intentions was so obscure, that St. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... is dependent upon the two gases, hydrogen and oxygen, for its support, these gases are now supplied in large quantities commercially. At first the gas cylinders were made of wrought iron; they were cumbrous and heavy, and the pressure of the inclosed gas was so low that a receptacle to hold only ten feet was a most unwieldy concern. But times have changed, and a cylinder of about the same size, but half the weight, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... such successively more and more elementary parts. At the first glance this new atomic theory has charms from its apparent simplicity, but the attempt thus to follow it out into its ultimate limits and extreme consequences seems to indicate that it is at once insufficient and cumbrous. ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... read and theorize too exclusively, and are inclined to assert that concentrated fertilizers supersede all others. They scout the muck swamp, the compost heap, and even the barnyard, as old-fashioned, cumbrous methods of bringing to the soil, in tons of useless matter, the essentials which they can deliver in a few sacks or barrels. On paper, they are scientific and accurate. The crop you wish to raise has constituents in certain proportions. Supply these, they say, and you have ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... character of the furniture. But there was no attempt on the part of the present owner, and there had clearly been none on the part of his predecessor, to suit the furniture to the room. The furniture, indeed, was of the heavy, graceless taste of George the First,—cumbrous chairs in walnut-tree, with a worm-eaten mosaic of the heron on their homely backs, and a faded blue worsted on their seats; a marvellously ugly sideboard to match, and on it a couple of black shagreen cases, the lids of which were flung open, and discovered the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the flatboat assured me that it was not safe to run in the night, at least during high water, when the current was bearing off houses, vessels, and other cumbrous things. Running over a floating log might disable our propeller, and we should be helpless then. There were but few great bends in this part of the river, much as the mighty stream twists about above New Orleans. I ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... internal relations, demanded new regulations, which, as before noticed, were attempted to be supplied by the pragmaticas. This was adding, however, to the embarrassments of a jurisprudence already far too cumbrous. The Castilian lawyer might despair of a critical acquaintance with the voluminous mass of legislation, which, in the form of municipal charters, Roman codes, parliamentary statutes, and royal ordinances, were received as authority in the courts. [40] The manifold ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... moon became totally obscured, dark cloud-masses spread over the heavens, the sea grew black, distant thunder rolled, and the sob of an approaching tempest became distinctly audible. Such indications of a westerly gale, were not encouraging to those cumbrous vessels, with the treacherous quicksands of Flanders ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... resumed. For several years our exports did not exceed ten millions. But our merchants were not disheartened; they gradually enlarged their trade and extended their field of adventure; privateers were put into the India trade, and entered into successful rivalry with the more cumbrous ships of the East India Companies. The new Constitution was adopted, the public debt funded, and duties imposed to meet the interest. The war-worn officer, the patriotic merchant, and the humble capitalist, who had relied on the honor and justice of the country, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... training either, for when he came to the "turn," his head and tail came up, his eye brightened, and, with a playful movement of his huge body, and without the least hint from the deacon, he swung himself and the cumbrous old sleigh into line, and began to straighten ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... train which accompanied, him showed by its variety the immense extent of country he had traversed during this first campaign. Among the prisoners were representatives of widely different races;—Khati with long robes and cumbrous head-dresses, following naked mountaineers from Shugunia, who marched with yokes on their necks, and wore those close-fitting helmets with short crests which have such a strangely modern look on the Assyrian bas-reliefs. The actual results of the campaign were, perhaps, hardly commensurate ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... sight never to have been forgotten could we have gazed then on that city of the sea, have watched the cumbrous barks, so unlike our light-winged merchant ships, or our swift steamers, which sailed heavily up and down the blue Adriatic, till they came in sight of the famous city, the resort of all nations, in whose canals, and among whose marts and palaces, might be seen the strange ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
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