preciosity

1902, R. Langton Douglas, A History of Siena, New York: E.P. Dutton, Chapter 18, p. 385, [Italian renaissance painter Neroccio] had the fastidiousness, the preciosity, the love of archaisms, of your true decadent.

1916, John Cowper Powys, “Oscar Wilde” in Suspended Judgments, New York: G. Arnold Shaw, p. 416, The style of Wilde is one of the simplest in existence, but its simplicity is the very apex and consummation of the artificial. He uses Biblical language with that self-conscious preciosity—like the movements of a person walking on tiptoe in the presence of the dead—which is so different from the sturdy directness of Bunyan or the restrained rhetoric of the Church of England prayers.

1913, John Hay Beith (as Ian Hay), Happy-Go-Lucky, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Book 3, Chapter 12, p. 151, “Yes, mother mine,” she replied. (Sylvia was rather addicted to little preciosities of this kind.)

He did not love the vulger herd, but he knew that his own vulgarity would be greater if he forbade it ingress, and that it was not by preciosity that he would attain to the intimate spirit of the dell.

1754, uncredited translator, The History of the Moravians by Heinrich Rimius, London: J. Robinson, Section 14, p. 90, An honest Man that sits in our common Court of Justice, to decide there instead of the Sovereign according to the common Law and our Statutes, is an inestimable Preciosity for us […]