Contents
-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Bald as a cannon ball.Blue like an ancient Briton.I blush as red as cochineal.Bulged out in the sun like a pumpkin.Calm as a Quaker.Clean as the carving knife chops the carrot.Dismal as a mute at a funeral.Eager as a ghoul for blood.Earrings like chandeliers.Fabulous as Bucephalus or Black Bess.They fall like grass before the mower.Fragrant as lilacs.Fresh as a man’s recollections of boyhood.Gaudy, like a harlequin’s jacket.Gracious as a duchess.Happy as a rose-tree in sunshine.A woman’s heart is just like a lithographer’s stone,—what is once written upon it cannot be rubbed out.Leered at her like a satyr.Lingering a minute, like outcast spirits, who wait, and see, through the heaven’s gate, angels within it.Magnificent as Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth.Malicious as Satan.Pale as a tablecloth.Pompous as an undertaker.Proud as the Bourbons.Puffy as a bolster.Red as a poppy.Restless as Ulysses.Roars like a bull of Bashan.Round and pale as a pair of suet dumplings.Ruinous as guilt.A shriek and a yell
Like the devils of hell.Shrunk away tremulously, as fairies in the story-books, before a superior bad angel.Eat his dinner as silently as a brother of La Trappe.Snobbishness is like death in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you never have heard, “beating with equal foot at poor men’s doors, and kicking at the gates of Emperors.”Soft as satin.Sound as a top.Stared aghast at her a minute, as Macbeth might on beholding Banquo’s sudden appearance at his ball-supper.Stately as a queen.Sulky as a bear.Sure as comes the postman and the sun.Tall as a grenadier.Timid as a fawn.Vain as a girl.White as a ceiling.I turned as white as cold boil’d veal.White, and ghastly, like an army of tombstones by moonlight.