Then, "I have frequently observed," he spoke, in absent wise, "that all young women having that peculiarly vacuous expression about the eyesI believe there are misguided persons who describe such eyes as being 'dreamy,'are invariably possessed of a fickle, unstable and coquettish temperament.

Her moral and religious principles were known by the firm stand she took against common incentives to dissipation and irreligionsuch as card-playing and Sunday entertainmentsagainst the introduction of questionable topics, unseemly language, and vacuous frivolity into conversation.

The follies of fashionable life are treated with nothing severer than light raillery; and its actually distasteful features,its lapses into stupidity, its vacuous restlessness, its ennui,are cunningly suppressed.

How absolutely idiotic the women appeared to us, and the men, how vacuous, fatuous, and impertinent!

Adj. vacant, unintellectual, unideal^, unoccupied, unthinking, inconsiderate, thoughtless, mindless, no-brain, vacuous; absent &c (inattentive) 458; diverted; irrational &c 499; narrow-minded &c 481.

Could men with such vacuous grins, such an air of imbecile good-nature, be capable of acting wisely in any terrible crisis?could they have nerve and readiness, quickness, decision, all those grand qualites which are needed by the seaman who has to contend with the fury of the elements?

Behind him came Lovel, an almost albino type with straw-coloured hair and eyes bleached and passionless; the vacuous smile was never gone from his lips.

A grim meaning rose in the vacuous eye of Lovel; Isaacs caressed his diamond pin, smiling in a sickly fashion; McNamara's wandering stare fixed and grew unhumanly bright; Ufert openly dropped his hand on his gun-butt and stood sullenly defiant.

I wonder it never occurred to me," Mrs. Linceford was replying presently, to her vacuous inquiry.

The same instant there came a blinding, dazzling light; then, that awful vacuous rattle in the throat of thunder that tells it comes in the name of Death the destroyer.

He was not of the jealous race of those who "Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne"; nor of the temper of George III., who chose his ministers for their vacuous compliancy.

She looked up at Benton out of vacuous eyes, grinned, and extended to him a square-faced bottle of Old Tim gin.

This late far niente and vacuous inaction here have been undermining my spirit; this inert brooding upon the earth; this empty life, and bursting brain!

The head of the victorious youth seems too small for his stature, and the features are almost brutally vacuous, though burning with an insolent and carnal beauty.

He looked round the theatre, noticing the indifferent faces of the critics, and the women's shoulders seemed to him especially vacuous and imbecile.

The feeling for space possessed by the architect has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn; the area enclosed, though somewhat cold and vacuous to northern taste, is at least impressive by its severe harmony.

" Still no reply,only the same vacuous look,now more stolid, if possible, than before.

She fairly deluged them with the spray of her admiring ejaculations in praise of the musicianemploying, hit or miss, every musical term that popped into her vacuous head.

he babbled in vacuous admiration. '

He remained standing, hat in hand, fitted his glass with vacuous care and surveyed the room with deliberately insolent scrutiny.

They, like a vast army, bent low with a sound as of heavy artillery rumbling over a bridge that covered vacuous depths.

Your conversation bores me inexpressibly, and your countenance, which is at once vacuous and singularly plain, disagrees with me thoroughly.

But Goethe's attitude toward the "Child" was far removed from that of poet-pasha, and Bettina had nothing of the vacuous odalisque in her composition.

These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;that is the chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over.

What will do for fifteen is somewhat vacuous for—” She paused abruptly, colored and laughed.

"WELLYESRATHER VAPID.

In order to obtain well-flavoured and eatable meat, we must relinquish the idea of making good soup from it, as that mode of boiling which yields the best soup gives the driest, toughest, and most vapid meat.

With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid.

Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than rudeness.

Let F.H. lay down his garrulous uncle; and Honorius dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of six boysthings between boy and manhoodtoo ripe for play, too raw for conversationthat come in, impudently staring their father's old friend out of countenance; and will neither aid, nor let alone, the conference: that we may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were wont to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood.

Writing to Coleridge on January 5, 1797, Lamb speaks of Hoole as "the great boast and ornament of the India House," and says that he found Tasso, in Hoole's translation, "more vapid than smallest small beer sun-vinegared."

Of politics he knew nothing; they were out of his line of reading and thought; and his drollery was vapid, when given in short paragraphs fit for a newspaper; yet he has produced some agreeable books, possessing a tone of humour and kind feeling, in a quaint style, which it is amusing to read, and cheering to remember.

Honorius dismiss his vapid wife.

The once clear and enjoyable tastes of simple objects become dull and vapid; thus highly spiced and seasoned articles of food are in demand, and then follows continued indigestion, with all its suffering.

There is no gilt, no mock modesty in his style; there is to vapid sentimentalism in the ideas he expounds.

It is surprising that Scott should include in Swift's works a vapid and pointless contribution attributed to a 'Person of Quality.'

In 1708 he published a vapid and stupid parody, suggested by John Philip's Splendid Shilling and Cider, entitled Wine.

The condensed old comedy which has just been laid before the readers of PUNCHINELLO, is as inane and vapid as anything that WALLACK'S theatre has shown us in the past month.

~The Unwilling Muse.~ Oh nothing in all life worse is, For abating superfluous pride, Than having to scribble on verses With the editor waiting outside; I am hearing a lecture on Shelley, Where I ought to be able to dream, But my brain is as vapid as jelly.

In the first place, it aims to produce "literary" plays, not the vapid, panoramic kind that merely pass away the time.

stupid, slow, flat, insipid, vapid, humdrum, monotonous; melancholic &c 837; stolid &c 499; plodding.

But if he can breathe it with impunity, and still retain the fervour of his early enthusiasm, and the simplicity and purity of the faith that was once delivered to the saints, why not extend the benefit of his own experience to others, instead of taunting them with a vapid pastoral theory?

When Crabbe published his Parish Register, the novels of the day were largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, without atmosphere, colour, or truth.

We are not to be turned from our purpose by such vapid babblings.

If an ideal has no point of contact with what exists, it is probably not much more than the vapid outcome of intellectual or spiritual self-indulgence.

If Keats had been a peer like Byron, he would have been loaded with vapid commendation.

One too famous volume of proverbial philosophy had immense vogue, but it is so vapid, so wordy, so futile, as to have a place among the books that dispense with parody.

We may, perhaps, yawn over the intermingled Latin and law of Arcangeli, in spite of the humour of parts of it, as well as over the vapid floweriness of his rival; but for all that, we are touched keenly by the irony of the methods by which the two professional truth-sifters darken counsel with words, and make skilful sport of life and fact.

Its basis is to be found in this very knowledge of human nature which is so essential, although the superstructure is often nothing more than vapid futility.

" "He looks fitted for the hero of a vapid English novel.