"Small beer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is also the third. With the dull it will pass for wit, with some it will pass for scorn, and even the witty will not be enabled to point out the difference, without running the risk of being considered invidious. It will cover every defect with a defect still greater; for who can call small beer tasteless when it is sour, or dull when it is bottled and has a froth ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... pumpkins"—though now she looks sober— She's brilliant; she is "no small beer." No, no, Cinderella, my dear! Your envious "sisters" may jeer, And sit on you yet, for a year; Redtape your advancement may fear, And Monopoly's patrons look queer; But, as sure as the month of October Is famous for sound British beer, Vested Interest ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... word, you don't think small beer of yourself! Hamper has had a loss of you. How came he to let you ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that 'For a lady of quality, since dead, who received us at her husband's seat in Wales with less attention than he had long been accustomed to, he had a rougher denunciation:—"That woman," cried Johnson, "is like sour small beer, the beverage of her table, and produce of the wretched country she lives in: like that, she could never have been a good thing, and even that bad thing is spoiled."' [Anec. p. 171.] And it is probably of her, too, that another ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... to-morrow and take my chance, &c., but they dissuaded me from so rash a step, as I really think on consideration it would have been; for if the Pearsons were not at home, I should inevitably fall a sacrifice to the arts of some fat woman who would make me drunk with small beer. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
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