Gilded reins do not make for a better horse.

Dear!" said Clarissa, and Lucy shared as she meant her to her disappointment (but not the pang); felt the concord between them; took the hint; thought how the gentry love; gilded her own future with calm; and, taking Mrs. Dalloway's parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which a Goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle, sheds, and placed it in the umbrella stand.

The palace was a gilded cage for the princess.

Sometimes he would give her cheeses made of cow's milk, sometimes ripe fruit, sometimes garlands of fresh flowers, or birds which he had captured in their nests. On one occasion even he presented her with a goblet, gilded at the edges, and on another with a little calf from the mountains.

He came into a gilded chamber, where he saw upon a bed, the curtains of which were all open, the most beautiful sight ever beheld—a princess who appeared to be about fifteen or sixteen years of age, and whose bright and resplendent beauty had something divine in it.

The lavish Gilded Age mansions of the late 1800s and modern-day McMansions both reflect the conspicuous consumption of a powerful wealthy class.

Never has youth been exposed to such dangers of both perversion and arrest as in our own land and day. Increasing urban life with its temptations, prematurities, sedentary occupations, and passive stimuli just when an active life is most needed, early emancipation and a lessening sense for both duty and discipline, the haste to know and do all befitting man's estate before its time, the mad rush for sudden wealth and the reckless fashions set by its gilded youth--all these lack some of the regulatives they still have in older lands with more conservative conditions.

The noble lady drove by towards the baron's mansion with her three daughters, in a gilded carriage drawn by six horses.

There, roof and pinnacle the Dardans tear – / death standing near – and hurl them on the foe, / last arms of need, the weapons of despair; / and gilded beams and rafters down they throw, / ancestral ornaments of days ago.

Who would gild a lily?