Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
A common room, with no carpet save a square in front of the fireplace; no curtains except a piece of something like drugget nailed flat across all the lower half of the window to make the light fall from upwards; two or three horsehair chairs, nearly worn out; a table in a corner, littered with books and papers; a horrible lay-figure, at the present moment dressed apparently for a scarecrow; a large easel, on which stood a half-finished oil-painting these constituted almost the whole furniture of the room.
Coombe knew that Miss Milligan herself would never mention it to a soul. She felt quite sure of that, still as it did not appear how the little plot could be spread abroad under those circumstances unless the lay-figure in the corner should become communicative, Mrs. Coombe's sentence remained plaintively unfinished.
In short, the Marchioness de Fleury is an animated fashion-plate! a lay-figure dressed in gauze, silk, lace, ribbon, feathers, flowers, that breathes, talks, dances, waltzes! a mantua-maker's, milliner's, hair-dresser's puppet, set in motion, not a woman." "Has she really no heart, then?" questioned Bertha.
And now the worthy Mrs Wilfer, having used her youngest daughter as a lay-figure for the edification of these Boffins, became bland to her, and proceeded to develop her last instance of force of character, which was still in reserve.
But not so Jones: he is not a real man but a melodramatic lay-figure, playing to the gallery as he spouts speeches about the purely metaphoric bleeding of his heart, oblivious of the disfigurement of his sweetheart's visage from real blood. This was no real scene to Fielding himself: why then should it be true: it has neither the accent nor the motion of life.
In the earliest fictions, whether in prose or verse, the hero had been merely a type, little more than a lay-figure capable of violent attitudes, a doer of deeds who, as Professor Gummere has explained, "answered the desire for poetic expression at a time when an individual is merged in the clan."
The best way of indicating the personal mood which emerges as his final attitude is to describe it as that of the perfectly natural man confronting the universe. Of course, there is no such "perfectly natural man," but he is a legitimate lay-figure, and we all approximate to him at times.
So they got up and went home, and Karl forgot the lay-figure, leaving it in busy motionlessness all night before the easel. When Teufelsbuerst saw it, he turned and fled with a cry that brought his daughter to his help. He rushed past her, able only to articulate: "The vampire! The vampire! Painting!"
There is no need to dwell upon the mental agonies of that miserable night. Perhaps, of all the five, the one least qualified to endure it realized the prospect of suffering most acutely. Mrs. Vickers lay-figure and noodle as she was had the keen instinct of approaching danger, which is in her sex a sixth sense. She was a woman and a mother, and owned a double capacity for suffering.
I might have accepted him: and I might not have made him happy. I wanted a hero, and the jewelled garb and the feather did not suit him. 'No; he is not that description of lay-figure. You have dressed it, and gemmed it, and made your discovery. Here is a true man; and if you can find me any of your heroes to match him, I will thank you.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking