valetudinarian

With their anachronistic and bookish air, Lamb's essays have traditionally been viewed as quaint, somewhat quirky exercises in valetudinarian impressionism, retrospective and inward-turning, celebrating the past, especially the past of childhood.

It is for the backward, and by one of their number, that these sketches were written." Woodress notes Cather's increasingly valetudinarian attitude from 1922 on, her disillusionment with the postwar Jazz Age, the callousness of prosperity--stingy, grasping, extravagant--and the lazy descendants of earlier generations (335-36).

She is further restricted by her valetudinarian father's gentle selfishness, which resists any kind of change and permits a social life limited to his own small circle, exclusive to the degree of admitting only four people as his closest acquaintances and only three to the second group.

Woodhouse and Isabella and their valetudinarian concerns about health and treatments.

And at the pace I can manage these days, could there be a better companion than a valetudinarian Border terrier or an ailing toddler?

The main letter writers-and the only ones to describe Harrogate--in Humphry Clinker are Matthew Bramble, a tetchy but generous-hearted valetudinarian who addresses his letters to his doctor, and his young nephew, Jery Melford, whose correspondent is a fellow student at Oxford.

At a deeper level, finally--drawing on diaries, private correspondence, and contemporary reminiscences and arranging her exposition in diachronic sections ("Scenes from Family Life," "The Victorian," "Pre-Raphaelite," "Artist," "Man of Letters," "Marriage," "Radicals," "The Patient," and "Coda")--Thirlwell has provided readers with an almost Chekhovian account of the passionate bonds which united "William and Lucy," as well as the mingled idealism and insecurity of Lucy Rossetti's temperament in her last valetudinarian decade.

Paul Crumbley's contribution, the final essay in this section, compares Stoddard's story "Collected by a Valetudinarian" to Constance Fenimore Woolson's "Miss Grief."

A contemporary guidebook describes the town as 'the resort of the weary invalid, the fastidious valetudinarian, the wealthy merchant and the thoughtful student'.