United States or Macao ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A pair of posturing, smirking chamberlains took me in charge, and ushered me with their flimsy golden wands to the dais at the farther end. It appeared that I was to sit on Phorenice's divan, and eat my meat out of her dish. "There is no stint to the honour the Empress puts upon me," I said, as I knelt down and took my seat. She gave me one of her queer, sidelong looks.
Their Pathan allies, whose hearts were evidently not in the business, showed but lukewarm enthusiasm, and escaped as best they could; but the Hindustanis stood to a man. They fought like fanatics, coming boldly and doggedly on, and going through all the preliminary attitudes and posturing of the Indian prize-ring.
In the case of the worm, the moment he saw his prey which I selected for its liveliness he came to a nearer perch, and stood there a few minutes, posturing, shaking his plumage in great excitement, looking at me and then at the tempting object.
One after another they got up and did the same twisting and posturing, without dancing, and while one posed and contorted the rest unenviously joined the spectators in their clapping and their hoarse cries of "Ole!" It was all perfectly proper except for one high moment of indecency thrown in at the end of each turn, as if to give the house its money's worth.
Two of them went through a very lively performance, leaping and whirling very rapidly. The exhibition concluded with a round dance, which was thought to be very pretty, perhaps because it was exceedingly lively. Mrs. Belgrave and Mrs. Blossom had never been to a theatre in their lives, never saw a ballet, and were not capable of appreciating the posturing, though the animated dance pleased them.
It is difficult, at the present day, to realise the greatness of his achievement. Fielding found, posturing as heroines of romance, the Clelias, Cleopatras, Astraeas; he left the living women, Fanny Andrews, Sophia Western, Amelia Booth. "Amelia," writes his great follower Thackeray, "... the most charming character in English fiction, Fiction! Why fiction? Why not history?
Thus equipped for the coming struggle, this high-browed ruffian, with his semi-intellectual cast of countenance, his jerky restless posturing, his splay-footed waddle, "like a lame Muscovy duck," in the graphic words of his gaol companion, stood up to plead for his life before the Supreme Court at Dunedin.
Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to stand for nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and rarely woos your sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing. For Beauchamp will not even look at happiness to mourn its absence; melodious lamentations, demoniacal scorn, are quite alien to him. His faith is in working and fighting.
Simple, you will say; yes, but better than a fricassée of Faust, garnished with hags, imps, and blue flame; better, far better than a drawing-room set at the St James's, with an exhibition of passion by Mrs and Mr Kendal; better, a million times better than the cheap popularity of Wilson Barrett an elderly man posturing in a low-necked dress to some poor trull in the gallery; nor is there in the hall any affectation of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a broken-winded barrel-organ playing a che la morte, bad enough in prose, but when set up in blank verse awful and shocking in its more than natural deformity but bright quips and cranks fresh from the back-yard of the slum where the linen is drying, or the "pub" where the unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will last her a week.
Lawyers wear archaic robes and use a strange language in their mysteries, conveying to us a belief that Justice is an ancient witch whose evil eye can be averted only by the incantation and grotesque posturing of her initiate priests. But I am not sure that financiers do not understand the art of hypnotic suggestion best of all.
Word Of The Day