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Updated: April 30, 2025
He was a huge, heavy man, broad and muscular; his two hands clinched, tied and manacled behind him, looked like formidable hammers capable of striking a man down dead at one blow; his whole aspect was repulsive and terrible there was no redeeming point about him for even the apparent fortitude he assumed was mere bravado meretricious courage which the first week of the galleys would crush out of him as easily as one crushes the juice out of a ripe grape.
Ahab thought he was marrying wealth and dignity, and providing for the greatness of his house, and, as often happens in such marriages, he forgot to ask for a certificate of character, forgot to ask what sort of mother he was providing for his children. She came with all her meretricious splendour covering one of the most fiendish natures that ever wore a woman's form.
I have seen in his face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him; but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it to answer what he asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace and it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a fostering sunbeam.
The vaulting itself also being panelled, to resemble elaborate stone fretwork, rather detracts from the general beauty of the building, being but a meretricious kind of ornamentation, and quite unworthy the building. There are three stained glass windows above the choir "Through which the lights, rose, amber, emerald, blue," stream upon the pure marble and golden pulpits.
The "Mikado" and "Pinafore" have done yeoman's service in displacing the meretricious delights of Offenbach and Lecocq; and Howells' little pieces yield an exquisite, though innocent, enjoyment to those whose taste in farces has not been fashioned and spoiled by clumsy English adaptations or imitations of intriguing levers-de-rideau, and to those who do not associate the name of farce with horse-play and practical joking.
Lecky admits that "Lord Chatham's taste was far from pure, and that there was much in his speeches that was florid and meretricious, and not a little that would have appeared absurd bombast but for the amazing power of his delivery," he makes a serious deduction from his claim to the best style of eloquence which no one ever made from the speeches of his son.
Commercialized minds, given over to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good audience. Our few poets in English who have possessed some universality of appeal have had to make concessions.
A massive rustic basement of marble was seated as solidly in the element as if it grew from a living rock, while story was seemingly raised on story, in the wanton observance of the most capricious rules of meretricious architecture, until the pile reached an altitude that is little known, except in the dwellings of princes.
He sat down amid the cheers of a large portion of his party, for the end of his speech had been full of effective if meretricious appeal. But the debate that followed showed that the speech had been a failure.
There was an artist, too, who held an argument with the architect on art which mon capitaine considered meretricious and hair-splitting, his conviction being that they were only airing a wordy pretentiousness and really knew little more of what they were talking about than he.
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