So we o’ershroud stars and roses,
Cherub and trophy and garland.
Nothings grow something which quietly closes
Heaven’s earnest eye,—not a glimpse of the far land
Gets through our comments and glozes.

1903, Cuthbert Atchley, The Parish Clerk, and his Right to Read the Liturgical Epistle, Alcuin Club Tracts IV, London: Longmans, Green & Co., p. 15,
The state of practice in the first half of the fifteenth century may be gathered from the gloze of Nicholas de Tudeschis, called Panormitan, on the text Ut quisque which we have quoted above.

The relation of certain words in the original to the practice of my translation may require gloze.

[…] if Virtue aught may crave, or Heav’n,
Beware, alike, of factious leagues, impure,
And courtly glozes vile.

No tender word or dainty gloze
Could give him pleasure half so fine
As that which tingled to her blows.

We have flattered thee, O Lord, with our tongues, and dissembled in our double hearts like the Israelites, whom thou hast fearfully punished in the sight of all the world, and saluted thee long with Judas kiss; to wit, with a vizard and show of religion, with the gloze of outward profession, drawing near thee with our lips, but our hearts far from thee […]

1859, Leander Clark, “Sonnet No. 6” in Kenridge Hall, and Other Poems, Washington: Franklin Philp, p. 72,
Wear not the mask of Love upon thy face,
For fear my eye discern; ’twere better veil
The sweet serenity Love’s eye would trace,
Than with its gloze to make his visage stale.

Himself, he hints, is ever in the throes
Of some grim struggle for his Self’s control.
M’Corkle lies. He never fought. Speech is his rôle.

Of what were generative organs made? / And for what profit were those creatures wrought? / … / Gloze as you will and plead the explanation / That they were only made for the purgation / Of urine, little things of no avail / Except to know a female from a male […]

1810, Joanna Baillie, The Family Legend: A Tragedy, Act 5, Scene 2, pages 126-127.
As he pretended, struck, then stern and silent,
Till presently assuming, like his father,
A courtesy minute and over-studied,
He glozed us with his thanks:

On this ground it is that Christianity works its way in Christianizing a community—if only it have free scope. It does this, not by glozing the evil that is in the world; not by extenuating, or by exaggerating the damage which human nature has sustained; but it does so by raising, in all minds, the ideal of human nature […]

1906, E. A. Baker, Introduction to Moll Flanders and Roxana, G. Routledge & Sons (New York), p. xviii,
…his contempt for every romantic or sentimental motive that would gloze over real causes, and represent the conduct of human beings rather as we would have it to be than as it is…

The Brookers never called these biscuits biscuits. They always referred to them reverently as ‘cream crackers’—‘Have another cream cracker, Mr Reilly. You’ll like a cream cracker with your cheese’—thus glozing over the fact that there was only cheese for supper.

The scanty light glozed them with the glory of day, and, forgetful of pain and thirst and hunger, and of the menace of death, they sank upon the floor and cried, keeping fast hold of each other the while.

Gloze

Meaning

Noun

Verb