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The Court wore an air of such splendour and magnificence that these Mussulmans, used though they were to Asiatic pomp, seemed surprised and amazed at so brilliant a reception, at which nothing, indeed, had been forgotten. The ambassador-in-chief was a pleasant young man, tall, shapely, and almost as good-looking as the King.

He thought that he was safe in the present case, not believing that the queen would spoil her masquerade by naming Lady Muskerry as one of the dancers nevertheless, as he was acquainted with the passion his wife had to expose herself in public, by her dress and dancing, he had just been advising her very seriously to content herself with being a spectator of this entertainment, even though the queen should have the cruelty to engage her in it: he then took the liberty to show her what little similarity there was between her figure, and that of persons to whom dancing and magnificence in dress were allowable.

At the same time, an impression of the utter disconnectedness of it all, the absence of all spirit or meaning; this magnificence being as the turning out of a great rag bag of purple and crimson and gold, of superb artistic things all out of place, useless, patternless, and almost odious: pageantry, ritual, complicated Palestrina music, crowded Renaissance frescoes, that huge Last Judgment, that mass of carefully grouped hideous nudities, brutal, butcher-like, on its harsh blue ground; that ceiling packed with superb pictures and figures, symmetrical yet at random, portentous arm and thighs and shoulders hitting one as it were in the eye.

Intaphernes and Otanes looked as annoyed as Boges had expected, on seeing their grandchild and daughter so pale, and in such miserable array, in the midst of all this splendor and magnificence. Cambyses had had experience of Phaedime's former extravagance in matters of dress, and, when he saw her standing before him so plainly dressed and so pale, looked both angry and astonished.

The shepherdess, as she advanced towards the chair, paused for an instant, impressed with that blaze of magnificence which is equally formed to strike every human eye. She looked round her with an air of timidity and suspense, and then going forward, ascended the steps and placed herself in the throne. At this action, as at a signal, the song recommenced.

The rooms had been restored under Elie Magus' orders, and with what magnificence! The windows were hung with the richest Venetian brocade; the most splendid carpets from the Savonnerie covered the parquetry flooring.

With a mother's natural anxiety to gratify her son's wishes, she promised to speak to the queen, not with the hope of succeeding in the impossible attempt to make her majesty break her word, but in order not to sit down in despair, while any remedy remained to be tried. That morning Isabella was dressed by the queen's orders with a magnificence which defies description.

It had rolled behind the flour-sack, and O'Flynn had seized on it with rapture. Where everybody was in such need of vegetable food, nobody under-estimated the magnificence of O'Flynn's offering, as he pushed the pitaty down into the toe of the muckluck.

They approached a door in the centre of the screen, and looking through between the iron bars, they beheld a scene of grandeur and magnificence wholly indescribable.

Having laid low the Hindu "City of Victory," the conquerors determined to make the Mahomedan "City of Victory" eclipse the magnificence of all that they had destroyed.