Their melancholy eyes took it in-a certain tawdriness it had, the litter of things incongruous: on the table a scattered pack of dingy cards; bottles and glasses, unwashed from last night, making red sticky circles on Marchese Peppino; everywhere was Marchese Peppino: one could not escape from it.
"The Furnace"
Rose Macaulay
In the meanwhile, before it should be time for lunch, we could walk up to a small church near the station and see the people at prayer in an interior which did not differ in bareness and tawdriness from most other country churches of the Latin south, though it had a facade so satisfyingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly Portuguese, that heart could ask no more.
"Roman Holidays and Others"
W. D. Howells
Several of them are written with great ability, and they were in 1895 comparatively free from that violence of invective, that tawdriness of rhetoric, and that proneness to fill their columns with criminal intelligence which are apt to be charged against the press in some other new countries.
"Impressions of South Africa"
James Bryce