More dull praise?

Usage examples of flatter.

I was beginning to understand my eccentric host, and, to flatter him, I answered that he praised me more than I deserved, and that my appetite was inferior to his.

The female portion of the academy, disciplined by the fashionable example of the countess and the queen to a noble grace of bearing, a flattering condescension, mount the dais, an areopagus sometimes sixty strong.

But when he arrived in Canada in 1934, few people knew much about Charles Eugene Bedaux, and what they were told, thanks to his own carefully orchestrated publicity, was all flattering.

Dobson was infatuated with her, and to be frank, Blythe was flattered.

She was high-spirited, even-tempered, and had a natural art which did not allow her to seem to understand too flattering a compliment, or a joke which passed in any way the bounds of propriety.

But if in these festival hours under the beam of Hecate they are uncontrollable by the Comic Muse, she will not flatter them with her presence during the course of their insane and impious hilarities, whereof a description would out-Brocken Brockens and make Graymalkin and Paddock too intimately our familiars.

All the fine trappings notwithstanding, I flattered myself that, when I held a convivium in any of my houses, the real worth was to be found in the conversation, not the setting.

But the truthful historian of the capabilities of crabs, the duty of one who stands sponsor to some of the species and who has the hardihood to indite some of the manifestations of their intelligence, wit, and craft, must discard the prejudices of his race, abandon all flattering sense of superiority, forbear the smiles of patronage, and contemplate them from the standpoint of fellowship and sympathy.

It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.

I am sure we should not have had seven hundred votes from your country--report says that you was very civil to the young and handsome of the sex, that you flattered the old and ugly, and even embraced the toothless and decrepid, in order to obtain votes.

But there is room to suspect that the elegance of his designs and engraving has somewhat flattered the objects which it was their purpose to represent.

Cecil flattered and cajoled him, portrayed England as a place of civility and charm, a featherbed into which James could at last relax after all the stony travails of his Scottish youth.

The police, in the August issue of their glossy in-house magazine Surete, publish a less than flattering account of the evolution of outlaw motorcycle gangs in North America.

If they seek an asylum from these sufferings, they find many private institutions, where flattering expectations of speedy recovery are aroused.

He hath made many fruitless attempts to regain the confidence of Allworthy, or to ingratiate himself with Jones, both of whom he flatters to their faces, and abuses behind their backs.