"Byword" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Renaissance guise, whether projected upon actual history, as in the person of Richard III, or strutting sublimated through Marlowe's blank verse, he spared at any rate to sentimentalise his brutality. Our forefathers summed him up in the byword that an Italianate Englishman was a devil incarnate; but he had the grace of being Italianate. It is from the Germanised avatar—the Bismarck of the 'Ems telegram,' with his sentimentalising historians and philosophers—that Europe ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... shirtcloak around my shoulders, pushed the door and went in. I had remembered that Rakhal was waiting for me. Not beyond this door, but at the end of the trail, behind some other door, somewhere. And we have a byword in Shainsa: A trail ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... a wave. Everybody felt it at once. People wondered how any sane, intelligent community could tolerate the presence of a set of corrupt scoundrels like the twenty aldermen of the city. Their names, it was said, were simply a byword throughout the United States for rank criminal corruption. This was said so widely that everybody started hunting through the daily papers to try to find out who in blazes were aldermen, anyhow. Twenty names are hard to remember, and as a matter of fact, at the moment when this ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... coat is wet," he cried. The odium, the scandal of a flight which would make her name a byword from London to Budapest, that he could envisage; but that this blood upon his coat should stain the dress she wore—no! He saw indeed that the bodice was ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... people and of his youth, making his tales as fanciful as possible, choosing deliberately to foster the merry humor in which they had been all day. He told her of his father, the crotchety old soldier, whose absurd sense of duty and whose elaborate Southern courtesy had become a byword in the South. He told her household tales that were prized like pieces of the Burrell plate, beautiful heirlooms of sentiment that mark the honor of high-blooded houses; following which there was much to recount of the Meades, from the admiral who fought as a boy in the ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... most munificent charity is unable to check the accumulation of evil, moral and physical, with which it vainly endeavours to contend? How is it, that while the wealth of England is a proverb among nations, the distress of her labourers is a byword no less universal; that while her commerce encircles the globe, while her colonies are spread through both hemispheres, while regions hitherto unknown are but the resting-place of her never-ceasing enterprise, the producers of all this wealth, the causes of all this luxury, the instruments ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Villa Negroni, which the Cardinal had built near the Baths of Diocletian. Having attained her first object, Vittoria took less pains to play the saint, and began to dress with unbecoming magnificence and to live on a very extravagant scale. Her name became a byword in Rome and her lovely face was one of the city's sights. The Cardinal, devotedly attached to his nephew, disapproved of the latter's young wife and regretted the many gifts he had bestowed upon her. Like most clever men, too, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian, and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... pointing the moral. When the teacher had finished, she rose with a sudden scream of rage, flung her new slate violently in one direction, her books in another, and departed, kicking the stove over with a well-directed foot as she left. Thus she became a byword to virtuous infancy, and as the years went by, and her wild beauty and her father's wealth grew apace, Deaneville grew less and less charitable in its judgment of her. Shandon lived in a houseful of men, her father's adored companion and greatly ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... It is the idolatry of money, position, shrewdness, learning—in one word, of success. It takes all the strength out of our morality, loyalty and obedience to God out of our religion, and makes cowards and liars of us, who should be heroes. It makes our religion a byword with honest unbelievers. And if they are honest scientific minds, waiting for evidence of the practical value of our religion, why should they believe, when we live so successfully down to the religion which we would scorn to openly profess? Our fathers may have been ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... cravenly study The getting of guerdons and gain, May have found their gold blasted and bloody, And tarnished by tears for the slain; And because they dishonoured their stations Were weak when they should have been strong, May be treated with scorn by the nations, A byword and ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... and life in her behalf, indeed, any true knight would do that: he must be willing to sacrifice his good name, be false to his religion and a traitor to his country. What do I care whether he be a coward, a craven, a scoundrel, a hissing and a byword, so long as he loves ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... lifting his hat in grave gesture. "I feel like a condemned coward, my name a byword for the rabble, being here in such comparative safety, when, in honor, I should be lying ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Rylton calmly. "She has taken care to tell me so. She will never marry you unless you get your uncle's money (and he is as likely to live to be a Methuselah as anyone I ever saw; the scandalous way in which he takes care of his health is really a byword!), but she will hold you ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... 'Philanthropist' has suffered the same fate as many other words in our language. It has become hackneyed and corrupted; it has taken a professional taint; it has almost become a byword. We are apt to think of the philanthropist as an excitable, contentious creature, at the mercy of every fad, an ultra-radical in politics, craving for notoriety, filled with self-confidence, and meddling with other people's business. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the greatest ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... pitiful and passionate appeal in the Senate Chamber: "Romans, allies, friends! help! help! Hannibal is at the gates of our city. Hannibal, the sworn enemy of Rome. Hannibal the terrible. Hannibal who fears not the gods, neither keeps faith with men. ["Punic faith" was a byword.] O Romans, fathers, friends! help while ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... spiritual relief. To be beaten by a cur like that! To have that common cad of a pettifogging lawyer drag him down and kick him about; tumble a name which had stood high, in the dust! The fellow had the power to make him a byword and a beggar! It was incredible! But it was a fact. And to-morrow he would begin to do it—perhaps had begun already. His tree had come down with a crash! Eighty years-eighty good years! He regretted none of them-regretted nothing; least of all this breach of trust which had provided ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was a man of high intellectual gifts, of military skill and great resource; out of consideration for which had he been chosen by Marie de Medicis to come upon this errand. But he marred it all by a temper so ungovernable that in Paris there was current a byword, ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... this rule in Scripture, or indeed in any literature, is probably one drawn up and condensed into a single verse by Paul. You will find it in a letter—the second to the Corinthians—written by him to some Christian people who, in a city which was a byword for depravity and licentiousness, were seeking the higher life. To see the point of the words we must take them from the immensely improved rendering of the Revised translation, for the older Version in this case greatly obscures the sense. They ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... distinguish the individual Greek—his insatiable curiosity, which left no field of thought unexplored—his spirit of daring enterprise, which carried the banner of civilisation to the borders of India and the Straits of Gibraltar—and his subtlety and craft, which in a later age made him a byword to the grave moralists ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... game. It could not be denied that he was a great expert at them, but there is a great difference between that, and being utterly unrivalled, which was the case with Moro. This gave rise to those tedious, eternal commentaries, which seasoned every game, until they became quite a byword ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... sees, too quickly, does she fail to smile, But never sees the shadow in her eyes His hounds are beaten till they scarce draw breath, And then caressed beyond the worth of hounds. His vassals know not if, from day to day, He will approve, or strike them with a curse. His humours are the byword of the court, And, were it not for his good-heartedness, His prowess, and undaunted strength at arms, Men would speak lightly of him in disdain; He is so often in a stormy rage, Or supplicating humour to atone,— Too petty to repent in very truth, Too light and yielding in repentance, when ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... bare brink of the world not even he has told me, and he is held to be garrulous. Among the elves, the only living things ever seen moving at that awful altitude where they quarry turquoise on Earth's highest crag, his name is a byword for loquacity ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... hall will be a byword in all the neighboring settlements from this time out," said ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... die to bring the flooding of the Nile—to make fertile all the Egyptian fields. If I answer not to the voices that call me, my name will be a byword wherever the rays of the sun-God fall. Another than I will go clothed in the dazzling robe. Another will hear the shouting of the multitude. Another will be given ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... Edenic idioms either were fast being debased or had become wholly obsolete. Such new-fangled words as "eftsoon," "albeit," "wench," "soothly," "zounds," "whenas," and "sithence" had stolen into common usage, making more direct and simpler speech a jest and a byword. ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... seventeen had been at once too innocent and too ignorant to judge a man's tendencies truly, or to rate his character at its real worth. As time went on, his earlier leanings grew more definite; he spent on pleasure far more than he could afford, and his conduct became a byword in the neighborhood. His boy he loved. He felt on a level with Jack, could understand him, play with him, punish him, and make friends with him; but little Sue was different. She always seemed to him the concentrated essence of her mother's soul, and when unhappy ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... explain who and what they were. We have already shown how much the monotheistic side of the Egyptian religion resembles that of modern Christian nations, and it will have come as a surprise to some that a people, possessing such exalted ideas of God as the Egyptians, could ever have become the byword they did through their alleged worship of a multitude of "gods" in various forms. It is quite true that the Egyptians paid honour to a number of gods, a number so large that the list of their mere names would fill a volume, but it is equally ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... hair. Behold, I have acquainted thee with her case and it is thine to command, and whatso thou orderest us that we will do. Thou knowest that in this affair is dishonour and disgrace to our name and to thine, and haply the islanders will hear of it, and we shall become amongst them a byword; wherefore it befitteth thou return us an answer with all speed." Then she delivered the letter to a courier and he carried it to the King, who, when he read it, was wroth with exceeding wrath with his daughter Manar ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... abundant." The representations in the other prophets are to the same effect. Zephaniah passes on the whole class the sweeping judgment, that they are light and treacherous persons. But the lowest deep is reached in Zechariah, who foresees a time, close at hand, when the very name of prophet will be a byword, and the father and mother of anyone who pretends to prophesy will thrust him through, to deliver themselves from the reproach of having any connection ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... invader in the recent war. In the course of a short month this fruitful land of peace and plenty, ready for the ingathering of a bounteous harvest, was devastated by the unspeakable savagery of a soldiery whose name will henceforth be a byword amongst all civilised peoples. It must surely be so, for the records of murders, robberies, and outrages unspeakable suffered without warning, without provocation by a prosperous and inoffensive people, will be a textbook of inhumanity and ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... been a byword between us, by the way, since I applied to him the phrase first used of Alexander Pope—"that he could not make tea without a conspiracy." And it may be that in this case Charteris spoke the truth, and had come to Fairhaven just for ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... fly, or flop into this field during the absence of Jimmy Scarecrow, and therefrom purloin, steal, or abstract corn, shall be instantly, in a twinkling and a trice, turned snow-white, and be ever after a disgrace, a byword and a ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... Guild! By all means drive Expletives from our highways; They are the ruin of our roads, The byword of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... condescension, but still I did it. My first wife was the Princess of England. How can we admit into a house which has formed such alliances as these a woman who is the widow of a hunchback singer, a mere lampooner, a man whose name is a byword through Europe?" ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to run you through," said his friend gloomily. Indeed, the Doctor stood in instant fear of this catastrophe; for Captain Runacles' temper was a byword, and not even his customary dark flush looked so dangerous as the lustreless, sullen eyes now sunk in a face that was drawn and pinched and absolutely wax-like in colour. To the Doctor's astonishment, however, it was the little hunchback who now jumped up and whipped ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of me nor to me defilement decree after purity!" Then she went up to him and made a show of fondness for him and sat down by his side and coaxed him, saying, "O my lord, what is this aversion thou displayest to me? Is it pride or coquetry on thy part? But the current byword saith, 'An the salam-salutation be little in demand, the sitters salute those who stand."[FN4] So if, O my lord, thou come not to me neither accost me, I will go to thee and accost thee." Said he, "To thee belong favour and kindness, O Queen of the earth in its length and breadth; and what am I ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... Antiochia won, Be glorious acts, and full of glorious praise, By Heaven's mere grace, not by our prowess done: Those conquests were achieved by wondrous ways, If now from that directed course we run The God of Battles thus before us lays, His loving kindness shall we lose, I doubt, And be a byword to the lands about. ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... believe this, and I also believe that without His aid we shall succeed in our political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little, partial, local interests, our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword to future ages. I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven an its blessing on our deliberations be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate." ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... in the wide, wide world—there are none to protect—none to care for me now! My father sleeps by Manuel's side, in the churchyard, and I am the last of my house. The name of De Garcia, once so proud and honored, will become a byword for desolation and misery! I have said cursed was the hour of my birth! and I now say blessed is the hour of my last sleep! You see me here from necessity, not choice, for all places would be alike to me now; but I have been driven from my lonely hearth—I dared not stay, I flew to this dreary ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... She was a byword in Falmouth; yet, strange to say, her victims kept a sneaking fondness for her, a soft spot In their hearts; while as sporting onlookers we boys took something like a fearful pride in the Warrior, as we called her. It was not in her nature to encourage any such weakness, or to use it. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... to be merely European, the European Powers cannot long continue with impunity such internecine strife, and that unless some real shape and substance can be given to the Concert of Europe—so long and so justly a byword among all thinking men—our continent (and with it these islands) will inevitably forfeit the leadership which has hitherto been theirs and surrender the direction of the world's affairs into the hands ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... of our army brought them within our lines before they were aware of it. When asked why not stay with their friends till the armies should move away, they answered that they were sure they could not endure the rigors of the climate! The phrase became a byword at our headquarters, where we were longing for the invigorating breezes ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... battle. You will not rest until you hear the terrible savage cry from their lips—War, war! You shall not hear it if I can prevent it! I am going to the Senate now. In fifteen minutes your names shall be a byword and a hissing among the nations. The best you can do is to take your vile guns ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... should make only a sorry showing among the splendid regiments mobilized there; or that to the big, rich City of San Francisco the ragged fellows from the prairies, who were dubbed the "Kansas Scarecrows," should become the byword and laughing ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... that for the future Finnemore was treated with a little more respect. The Sixth decided that dances did not pay, and so contented themselves with less noisy but little less aggravating amusements. For instance, Finnemore's hatred of Browning was a byword; so one day the entire form decided to learn The Lost Leader for repetition. For a while Finnemore bore it patiently, but when a burly chemistry specialist walked up to within two feet of him and began to bawl so loudly that his actual words were distinguishable ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about—one, perhaps, which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of—has put him temporarily at the world's mercy. They made him a nine days' wonder, a byword. And that, my dear Danton, is just where we come in. We know the man himself; and it is to be our privilege to act as a buffer-state, to be intermediaries between him and the rest of this deadly, craving, sheepish world—for the time being; oh yes, just for ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... love architecture dearly, and believe that it helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among beautiful things, we of the big towns are mostly compelled to live in houses which have become a byword of contempt for their ugliness and inconvenience. The stream of civilisation is against us, and we cannot ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... of the question that a man with four millions salted down and stored away, a man who all his life had been used to grappling with the big things and wrestling them down into submission, a man whose luck had come to be a byword—and had not it held good even in this last emergency?—would be balked by puny scraps of forged steel and a trumpery lock or two. Why, these cuffs were no thicker than the gold bands that Mr. Trimm had seen on the arms of overdressed women at the opera. The chain ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the lot. I stared at them in bewilderment. They were my own checks, sure enough; and underneath my name, on the back of each one, was the indorsement of the infamous blackleg whose name had been a byword ever since I could remember as that of the chief devil in the policy blackmail conspiracy that had robbed the poor and corrupted the police force ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... effect on Sancerre, and was cruelly retorted on the Sappho of Saint-Satur when, seeing her childless after five years of married life, little de la Baudraye became a byword for laughter. To understand this provincial witticism, readers may be reminded of the Bailli de Ferrette—some, no doubt, having known him—of whom it was said that he was the bravest man in Europe for daring to walk on his legs, and who was accused ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... always deep, had increased of late years with the knowledge that James looked on him as the real prop of his decline. It seemed pitiful that one who had been so careful all his life and done so much for the family name—so that it was almost a byword for solid, wealthy respectability—should at his last gasp have to see it in all the newspapers. This was like lending a hand to Death, that final enemy of Forsytes. 'I must tell mother,' he thought, 'and when it comes on, we must keep the papers from him ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... N. maxim, aphorism; apothegm, apophthegm[obs3]; dictum, saying, adage, saw, proverb; sentence, mot[Fr], motto, word, byword, moral, phylactery, protasis[obs3]. axiom, theorem, scholium[obs3], truism, postulate. first principles, a priori fact, assumption (supposition) 514. reflection &c (idea) 453; conclusion &c (judgment) 480; golden rule &c. (precept) 697; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... turned about and smitten him. He had meant to be a great editor of the Post some day, and the Post had turned him out with a brand of dishonor upon his forehead. He had tried to befriend a friendless old man, and he had acquired a father whose bequest was a rogue's debt, and his name a byword and a hissing. He had let himself be befriended by a slim little girl with a passion for Truth and enough blue eyes for two, and the price of that contact was this pain in his heart which would not be still ... ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... circular or quinary system, a forcedly artificial attempt at a natural system of classification, which soon became a byword among ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... I had in mind, viz., "social climbers," those scourges of modern society, the people whom no rebuffs will discourage and no cold shoulder chill, whose efforts have done so much to make our countrymen a byword abroad. ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... my own personal improvement, and will strive unceasingly to quicken the sense of racial duty and responsibility; I will in all these ways aim to uplift my race so that, to everyone bound to it by ties of blood, it shall become a bond of ennoblement and not a byword of reproach. ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... escaping out of the meshes of the law. Otherwise he may find unpleasant surprises in store for him. Had Mr. Mercer made it his business to acquire some rudiments of this useful knowledge, he would never have undergone that outrageous official ill-treatment which has become a byword in the annals of international amenities. And if these strictures be considered too severe, let us see what Italians themselves have to say. In 1900 was published a book called "La Quistione Meridionale" ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... father was wroth with her and said to her, "Fool that thou art, dost thou not know that the ignorant man who meddles in affairs falls into grievous peril, and that he who looks not to the issue of his actions finds no friend in time of evil fortune? As says the byword, 'I was sitting at my ease, but my officiousness would not let me rest.' And I fear lest there happen to thee what happened to the ox and the ass with the husbandman." "And what happened to them?" asked she. Quoth the Vizier, "Know, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... unawares, in a very smart frock and a superlatively becoming hat, smiling gaily, just stepping out of a magnificent white motor car, resting her hand familiarly on that of the most successful young financier in Paris, whose conquests among women of the world were a byword, and chaperoned by a flighty little Neapolitan teacher of singing. Truly, if some one had deliberately rubbed the back of his neck with a large lump of ice on that warm spring day, the chill could not have been more effectual. Morally ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... stories high, with wooden balconies and projecting windows, were interspersed with ruinous palm-thatched bamboo huts and grotesquely decorated temples filled with fat priests and hideous, ochre-daubed gods, and noisy with the incessant blare of conch shells and the jangling of bells. Lalpuri was a byword throughout India and was known to its contemptuous neighbours as the City of Harlots and Thieves. Poverty, debauchery, and crime were rife. Justice was a mockery; corruption and abuses flourished everywhere. A just magistrate or an honourable official was as hard to find as an honest citizen ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... found true and loyal to any promises involved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made the difference between their subsequent fortunes. The boy rose to a splendour and a noonday prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the records of his people, and became a byword among his posterity for a thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from Judah. The poor, forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank not herself from that cup of rest which she had secured for France. She never sang together with the songs that rose ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... full hearing of some ten or twelve spectators, mostly townsmen of Troy; and these, turning their heads, for a moment not believing their ears, stared speechlessly at the two men whose friendship had in six months passed into a local byword. Cap'n Hocken and Gap'n Hunken—what, quarrelling? No, no—nonsense: ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... maidenly reputation?" I demanded. "That hateful peddler-fellow and vile old hag will make your name a byword—O, ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... Hobnell, Pen was pronounced to be a murderer as well as a profligate, and his name became a name of terror and a byword in Clavering. But this was not all; he was not the only one of the family about whom the village began to chatter, and his unlucky mother was the next to become a ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hatless, and had he not caught cold and been carried off by pneumonia, would have spread his hatless gospel, rendering the name of Knox the Hatter infamous, and causing the word "Derby" to be henceforth a byword and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... time-honored joke about being comparatively unnecessary to their respective partners, and indeed the two men had a curiously dependent feeling toward each other. It was the close sympathy which twins sometimes have each to each, and had become a byword among all their acquaintances. They were seldom individualized in any way, and neither was able to distinguish himself, apparently, for one always heard of the family as Jake and Martin's folks, and of their possessions, from least to greatest, as belonging to both brothers. The only ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... May, Seigerman's name was presented. On each of three ballots he received one lone vote. When the news reached the boys in the Strip, they dubbed this one vote "Seigerman's Per Cent," meaning the worst of anything, and that expression became a byword on the range, from Brownsville, Texas, to the Milk River ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... and the artist's fingers had forgotten the use of the modeling tool. When the need for work began to be felt, when the Prince de Wissembourg, president of the committee of subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas spoke the inevitable byword of the idler, "I am just going to work on it," and he lulled his dear Hortense with fallacious promises and the magnificent schemes of the artist as he smokes. Hortense loved her poet more than ever; she dreamed of a sublime statue ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... detected him, and told Wishnu, who cast at him his discus, and cut his body from his head: but not until the nectar was on the way down his throat. Hence, though the body died, the head became immortal: and ever since, a thing unique, "no body and all head," a byword among philosophers, he takes revenge on Sun and Moon, the great Taletellers, by "gripping" them in his horrid jaws, and holding on, till he is tired, or can be persuaded to let go. Hence, in some parts of India, the doleful shout of the country people at eclipses: Chor do! chor do[1]! and ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... answered, "the idea is a noble one—But look at the reality! Has not priestly pandering to tyrants made the Church, in every age, a scoff and a byword among free men?" ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... self-reliance. Awaiting at every step an impulse from their adored leader, growing timid in the moment when decision was imperative, they did not prove equal to their task. Without his people Paoli was still a philosopher; without him they became in succeeding years a byword, and fell supinely into the arms of a less noble subjection. In this regard the comparison between him and Washington, so often ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... said Lucien. "So far, my friends have been mere skirmishers, but I have given them red-hot shot to-night. To-morrow you will know why we are making game of 'Potelet.' The article is called 'Potelet from 1811 to 1821.' Chatelet will be a byword, a name for the type of courtiers who deny their benefactor and rally to the Bourbons. When I have done with him, I am going to ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... to tell of the trial of Ganelon the traitor. Suffice it that he was torn asunder by wild horses, and his name remains in France a byword ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... were almost simultaneous—but from the deer, rabbits, and other wild animals of the forest, driven from their coverts by his advance. It is always convenient to have a scape-goat in case of disaster, and the German element in the Eleventh Corps have been fiercely censured and their name became a byword for giving way on this occasion. It is full time justice should be done by calling attention to the position of that corps. I assert that when a force is not deployed, but is struck suddenly and violently on its flank, resistance in impracticable. ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... the account of the early life of Dickens that Chesterton gently leads us to the birth of the immortal Mr. Pickwick, that supreme Englishman who is a byword amongst even those who scarcely know Dickens. The birth pangs of the advent of Pickwick was a sharp quarrel 'that did no good to Dickens, and was one of those which occurred far too frequently in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... to me not to betray the King and France," answered De Thou. "Know you that the preservation of your country is at stake; that if you yield to Spain our fortifications, she will never return them to us; that your name will be a byword with posterity; that French mothers will curse it when they shall be forced to teach their children a foreign ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... that is their mean yet mighty byword of reproach—the watchword with which they assassinated, hanged, and made away with Concini; and if I gave them their way they would assassinate, hang, and make away with me in the same manner, although ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... half-senseless condition, I should have been suffocated, or burned to death. The fright produced by this incident, and a very narrow escape, in some degree sobered me, but what I felt more than anything else was the exposure now; all would be known, and I feared my name would become, more than ever, a byword and a reproach. ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... heart of a small archipelago. All about us are verdure-covered islands. They are now the homes of native fishermen, but a century ago they were hiding-places for the fierce Malayan pirates whose sanguinary deeds made the peninsula a byword in ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... heart. I would not be sorry to die, and I would rather take the last stroke from you than from my enemies. It is not worth while to live, for I have no friend, and soon shall have no possessions. My cause is forlorn, and my name is a byword, and now, by my own doing, I have lost my only love. Strike just here, and my blood will be an atonement to thee for my sin, and generations unborn will bless the ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... shall not be content, I'll warrant, with shutting these homes of vice, as Cromwell did, but we shall not leave one stone upon another, and shall sow the spot with salt, that it may be a hissing and a byword amongst ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would have to face unpopularity. Every party vies with its rivals in sacrificing their principles on the altar of patriotism. Whereas the Catholic party in Belgium has for twenty-eight years refused the means of national defence, and has made the Belgian Army into a byword on the plea that barrack life is dangerous to the religious faith of the peasant, the German Catholics have voted with exemplary docility every increase of the army and navy. Only once did they dare to propose a small reduction in the estimates for the expenditure on the war against ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... would see him the next Sunday. And the one thing he had dreaded was spared him—namely, having to share a room with several other men, who might prove worse than undesirable company. For the ex-butcher, the man who was a byword in the country-side for his rough speech, in this showed himself capable of becoming a gentleman, that he had sympathy with a gentleman: he would neither allow Cosmo to eat with the labourers—to which Cosmo himself had no objection, nor would hear of his sleeping ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... The crime of my destroyer; and that done, 155 My tongue should like a knife tear out the secret Which cankers my heart's core; ay, lay all bare, So that my unpolluted fame should be With vilest gossips a stale mouthed story; A mock, a byword, an astonishment:— 160 If this were done, which never shall be done, Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate, And the strange horror of the accuser's tale, Baffling belief, and overpowering speech; Scarce whispered, unimaginable, wrapped 165 In hideous ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and arrest meant exposure. At their home in Vienna, let me tell you, baccarat had been played nightly as a pastime for their guests. So great was her luck that 'As lucky as the Baronne Frontignac' was a byword. Frontignac's price was this: she must take his fifty louis and play that stake at the Casino that night; when she brought him ten thousand ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... rich man, who affected the sordid habits of Lacedaemon, because of his greed. "More sordid than Patrocles" had become a byword at Athens. Even the public baths were too dear for Patrocles, because, in addition to the modest fee that was given to the bath-man, it was necessary to use a little oil for the customary friction after ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... remarkable. Economy is one of the motive powers of their existence, the solid pillars upon which their wealth and power are built; and yet Paris has been not only the home and the patron of the arts for centuries, but the arbiter of fashion for women, a byword for extravagance, and a forcing-house for a thousand varieties of pleasure. No race is so paradoxical, but then France is the genius among nations. Antiquity, and many invasions of her soil have given her an inviolable solidity, and the temperamental gaiety and keen intelligence ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Wordsworth's greatness. Jeffrey's petulant "This will never do," uttered, professedly, at least, more in sorrow than in anger, because the poet would persist, in spite of all friendly counsel, in misapplying his powers, has become a byword of ridiculous critical cocksureness. But the curious thing is that "The Excursion" has not "done," and that the Wordsworthians who laugh at Jeffrey are in the habit of repeating the substance of his criticism, though in more temperate and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... promises, cumulative irritation, which however might have remained submerged had it not been for the revelations of the acts of Count Luxburg, which have made the expression "spurlos versekt" a byword. This exhibition of callous plotting against Argentine lives immediately resulted in the handing of passports to the German Ambassador to Argentina, and during the third week in September both houses of Congress ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... become the abettor of thy vices—a polluted and a perjured man. Tremble!—even now I prepare the hour in which thou and thy false gods shall be unveiled. Thy lewd and Circean life shall be dragged to day—thy mumming oracles disclosed—the fane of the idol Isis shall be a byword and a scorn—the name of Arbaces a mark for the hisses ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... of that little hamlet town has, cruelly enough, passed into a byword—a synonym for everything that is rowdy, vulgar, apish in the English character, with the dregs stirred up. But yet it will ring down the silver grooves of Time as long as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the schooner's headlong speed, the distance between her and her quarry seemed to lessen scarcely at all. The old Revenge with her tall sticks and great spread of canvas was flying down before the wind with all the speed that had made her name a byword, and the man with the broken nose was evidently willing to take as ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... child; nay, for that is done here also and Neerbale will serve our Lord full well with thee at this.' Thereafter, telling it from one to another throughout the city, they brought it to a common saying there that the most acceptable service one could render to God was to put the devil in hell, which byword, having passed the sea hither, is yet current here. Wherefore do all you young ladies, who have need of God's grace, learn to put the devil in hell, for that this is highly acceptable to Him and pleasing to both parties and much good may grow and ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... came, and I have stayed to look upon the face of her whose beauty had power to drive the thought of me from the heart of Odysseus, and bring him, who of all men was the greatest hero and the foremost left alive, to do a dastard deed and make his mighty name a byword and a scorn. Knowest thou, Meriamun, that I find the matter strange, since if all else be false, yet is this true, that among women the fairest are the most strong. Thou art fair indeed, Meriamun, but judge if thou art more fair than Argive Helen," ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... Go then thyself! thy godship abdicate! Renounce Olympus! lavish here on him Thy pity and thy care! he may perchance Make thee his wife—at least his paramour! But thither go not I! foul shame it were Again to share his bed; the dames of Troy Will for a byword hold me; and e'en now My soul with ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... talk of is the bait that covers the hook for gudgeons. You have to accept the superstition, or your beautiful life to them is a byword and a hissing. ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... There was a byword among the Whig families at home (who, by intermarrying, had learned to gauge another's weaknesses), that "the Pett medal showed ill in reverse." Miss Diana had heard the saying. As a Vyell—the Vyells were, before all things, critical—she knew it to be just, as well as malicious; but as a dutiful ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Chang, falling on his knees. "It is impossible! It is impossible! You cannot strike off my father's nose. He cannot go down without his nose to the grave. He will become a laughter and a byword, and all my days and nights will be filled with woe. O reflect! Report that you have seen no such nose in your travels. You, ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... the uncomplaining boy Five years his slave and swineherd! In him rage Burst forth, with fear commixed, as when a beast Strains in the toils. "Can I alone stand firm?" He mused; and next, "Shall I, in mine old age, Byword become—the vassal of my slave? Shall I not rather drive him from my door With wolf hounds and a curse?" As thus he stood He marked the gifts, and bade men bare them in, And ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... commandments and My statutes which I have set before you, but go and serve other gods, and worship them: 7. Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house which I have hallowed for My name, will I cast out of My sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people: 8. And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done thus unto this land, and to this house? 9. And they shall answer, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... efforts at reconstruction. The Court which he dreamed of restoring, chastened by adversity, enhanced in dignity, resting upon a sound constitutional foundation, and fenced by a bulwark of stately reverence, was now to be a byword amongst the people, as the home of ignoble trifling, of bestial vice, of sordid intrigue, ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... know why—an' if yer tell another, I'll ram yer teeth down yer throat. She's been comin' 'ere for months, an' you've been sending her home drunk for the sake of a few shillings, to poison my life and make her name a byword in the neighbourhood. Now, listen to me! You'll not serve that woman again with ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... a man to whom no adventure is too wild or too daring. His reckless bravery is a byword amongst many savage peoples and amongst many others not savages, whose fears are not of material things, but of the world of mysteries in and beyond the grave. He dares not only wild animals and savage men; but has tackled African magic and Indian mysticism. ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... reception of the great theory first given to the world by Mr. Diogenes Dottle in a letter to The Daily Mandate. But the POSTMASTER-GENERAL is content to treat the question with the airy scepticism and obstructive complacency that have rendered the London Telephone service a byword of inefficiency, and refuses even to make a grant in aid of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... Quoth Kamirayah, "I saw her three years ago; but my sister Wakhimah seeth her at all times, for she is near to her people, and she saith that there is not in the world fairer than she. Indeed, this Queen Al-Anka is become a byword for beauty and comeliness." And Wakhimah said, "By the mighty inscription on the seal-ring of Solomon, there is not her like for loveliness here below." Then said Queen Al-Shahba, "An it needs must be ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... is it thou that hast turned my son's spirit into water? Is it thy love that hath made his name a byword among those who should love him because he is not as he once was—a man no one could meet in arms and overcome? Is it thou that hath sunk him in slothfulness, so that the wolfish lords and tyrant barons upon his marchlands ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... 1670, resorted to Charleston, New York, Providence, or Boston, and under licenses granted by royal governors joined hands with the colonial free-trader or East Indian "interlopers" to make the acts of trade a byword and a reproach. New England and Dutch merchants, "regarding neither the acts of trade nor the law of nature," carried provisions to Canada during the French wars. Tobacco was taken to Holland and Scotland, or smuggled ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... would sit on one's hat. They laid their eggs on pinnacles of rock without a vestige of nest, and singly. They looked just like stones. I suppose this was a protection from the land-crabs, about which you will have heard. The land-crabs of Trinidad are a byword and they certainly deserve the name, as they abound from sea-level to the top of the island. The higher up the bigger they were. The surface of the hills and valleys was covered with loose boulders, and the whole island ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... have not burnt your returned letter, pray re-send it me, as a monumental token of my stupidity. 'Twas a little unthinking of you to touch upon a sore subject. Why, by dabbling in those accursed Albums, I have become a byword of infamy all over the kingdom. I have sicken'd decent women for asking me to write in Albums. There be "dark jests" abroad, Master Cornwall; and some riddles may live to be clear'd up. And 'tis not every saddle is put on the right steed; and forgeries ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... care, if you weren't such an awful tease," admitted A.O. "But I know how you'll criticize him afterward. You'll make a byword of everything he said and quote it to me till kingdom come. You know how it would be, don't you, Mary?" turning to her. "You wouldn't want her taking notes on everything he said if ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and bringing to bear upon remote agricultural populations those terrors that had long since lost all value in the eyes of the townsfolk. It lived to become a thing of scorn. "Richardson's Ghost" became a byword for a bankrupt phantom—a preposterous apparition, that was, in fact, only too thoroughly seen through: not to apply the words too literally. Whether there is still a show calling itself "Richardson's" (the original Richardson died a quarter of a century ago, and his immediate followers ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... deformity you must go into some of the Renaissance churches,—fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming spirit which has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of religion; which has made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has rendered the population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its friendship to tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life of the Church that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of this superstition are the foolish and hideous ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... away, and when the General Election of 1895 was over it was a battered, broken and bitterly divided Irish Party which returned to Westminster—a Party which had lost all faith in itself and which was a byword and a reproach alike for its helpless inefficiency ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... men are to be pitied, for they are ever the butt, byword and prey of the untaught, who are often the knowing. As success came to Southey he lost the sense of values, that is to say, the sense of humor. He attacked Byron with great severity, and Byron's reply was the dedication of Don Juan, "To the illustrious Poet-Laureate, Robert Southey, LL.D." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... talking to you,"—she said—"For you believe in nothing—not even in God! You are a man of your own making—you are not a man in the true sense of manhood. How can you know anything of love? You will not find it in the low haunts of Paris where you are so well known,—where your name is a byword as that of an English 'milord' who degrades ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... a rule, Moses Ansell drank the cup of affliction instead of hospitality and bore his share to the full, without the remotest intention of being heroic, in the long agony of his race, doomed to be a byword and a mockery amongst the heathen. Assuredly, to die for a religion is easier than to live for it. Yet Moses never complained nor lost faith. To be spat upon was the very condition of existence of the modern Jew, deprived of Palestine ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... becoming a little easier for Wahb. He was gaining in health and strength, and the creatures he daily met now let him alone. But as he feasted on the pinons one morning after a gale, a great Black-bear came marching down the hill. 'No one meets a friend in the woods,' was a byword that Wahb had learned already. He swung up the nearest tree. At first the Black-bear was scared, for he smelled the smell of Grizzly; but when he saw it was only a cub, he took courage and came growling at Wahb. ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... for this purpose. Threats and bribes were without effect. Love might accomplish what the other two had failed to do. You know little of the ways of the world. Do you know that this house party is scandalous, for all its innocence? Do you know that Madame's name would be a byword were it known that we have been here more than two weeks, alone with two women? Who but a woman that feels herself above convention would dare offer this affront to society? Do you know why Madame the countess came? Company for Madame? No; she was to play make love to me to keep me out of the way. ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... but it has never been forgotten. It was the golden time to which men looked wistfully back when growing trouble and discord, attack from without, and dissension from within, had torn in pieces the unhappy island which had shone like a beacon through Europe only to become its byword. The Norsemen had not yet struck prow on Irish strand, and the period between the Synod of Whitby and their appearance seems to have been really one of steady moral and intellectual growth. Heathenism ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... undeveloped Idea were already germinating the wonders of an achievement grander than any of Schwartz, or Guttenberg, or Galileo. Oh, this beautiful, grand simplicity of Science, which was able, from the snail itself, the very type and symbol and byword of torpidity and inaction, to evolve what was to conquer time and space,—to outrun the wildest ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... johnny-cake, when it's hot, d—-d good, but when it's cold, d—-d sour and indigestible;— and you'll find me so!'' The latter part of this harangue made a strong impression, and the "down-east johnny-cake'' became a byword for the rest of the voyage, and on the coast of California, after our arrival. One of his nicknames in all the ports was "The Down-east Johnny-cake.'' So much for our petition for the redress of grievances. The matter was, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... little bit of tin and horn; I'm a byword, I'm a plaything, I'm a jest; The virtuoso looks on me with scorn; But there's times when I am better than the best. Ask the stoker and the sailor of the sea; Ask the mucker and the hewer of the pine; Ask the herder of the plain, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... inoffensiveness of her deportment to disarm the animosity of the people, and enduring not only menaces but even insult;[227] being ignorant in what direction to turn her steps, lest she should throw herself into the power of her arch-enemy. Her proud heart was bruised; her great name had become a byword and a scorn; the wife and the mother of kings, before whose frown the high-born and the powerful had once shrunk, sat shivering in the vast halls of a foreign palace, shrinking beneath the hoarse cries of a hostile multitude, and quailing in terror ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... bitterly. "I behaved in a perfectly disgraceful fashion. I degraded the old name, I made it a byword in the district. As sure as I am standing here at the present moment, I am more or less answerable for my mother's death. It is a strange thing with us Evors that all the men begin in this way. I suppose it is some taint in our blood. Up to the age ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... Home, and Honour,'" repeated Tom; "well, I think that our family never needed such consolations more, if indeed there are any to be found in mottoes. Our Heart is broken, our hearth is desolate, and our honour is a byword, but there remain the 'struggle and ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... themselves to the inevitable, and to end the nefarious diplomacy by which they are continually striving to recover what is for ever lost. The whole world is aware of the scandalous misrule and the flagrant immorality which, under the government of the Papacy, made the Eternal City a byword and a reproach. Under the secular government, Rome has made wonderful progress. It has better streets, cleaner inhabitants, less fever and filth, and a much smaller army of priests, beggars, and prostitutes. Catholics may rest ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... and I looked to her to become the mother of my children; but we could neither of us endure the other's presence for any length of time without a squabble, so that our domestic infelicity became a jest and a byword even among our servants. In these circumstances I felt it would be better that we should part. It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I was convinced that I would regard Pauline with more kindly ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... as purely the work of imagination as Middleton's "Witch," or the Hags in "Macbeth," or in Goethe's 'Faust.' Horace used Canidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of her craft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons. His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in this sense as we are with those of Squeers and ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... liar, then," ses Henery Walker; "he's arter it 'imself. And it ain't a respectable place for you to stay at. Anybody'll tell you wot a rascal Bob Pretty is. Why, he's a byword." ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... any way; for the old ones were a scandal—yes, be sure. What with sea-water and scrambling after gulls' eggs, they was becoming a byword all ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... had no guarantee for the promised concessions except the "Teutonica fides," which has become a byword and a reproach. But I am much mistaken if that was the sole or main motive that determined her resort to arms. She took a larger view. She felt that even if Germany, by miracle, kept her faith, the world, after a German victory, would be no place for free men to live ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... me!—Unus fiddlestick! you ought to be ashamed to show your face at the sessions: you'll be a laughing-stock to the whole bench, and a byword with all the pig-tailed lawyers and ...
— St. Patrick's Day • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... breeze of that August night down the rue Saint-Dominique, across the rue de l'Enfer, to the very ears perhaps of those within the Luxembourg, telling them that Bardelys and his friends kept another of those revels which were become a byword in Paris, and had contributed not a little to the sobriquet of "Magnificent" ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... tranquilly as if there were not a great war on hand, and still the citizen at home read each morning in his newspaper the stereotyped bulletin, "All quiet on the Potomac;" the phrase passed into a byword and a sneer. By this time, too, to a nation which had not European standards of excellence, the army seemed to have reached a high state of efficiency, and to be abundantly able to take the field. Why did not its commander move? Amid ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... would you be a thing to be shuddered at, a woman without a name, a byword for shame for ever?" Madame Staubach had been interrupted in her statement as to the belief entertained in respect to Linda's journey by herself and her two colleagues, and did not recur to that special point ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... 16, without having fired more than a round of shot. The truth is, March's carpenters and fishermen refused to fight, though reenforcements joined them halfway home and they made a second attempt on Port Royal in August. March returned to Boston heartbroken, for his name had become a byword to the mob, and he was greeted in the streets with shouts of "Old ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... Fourteenth Street was burgeoning out as the new Rialto. Society set its seal upon the establishment. The clubs of the immediate neighbourhood, of which there were several, did not think it necessary to install cuisines when Delmonico's was so close at hand. The name of the house is still a byword in the land, but the names of Filippini and Lattard, two of the maitre d'hotel who helped to make Delmonico's famous, have been forgotten by all but a very few. What supper parties were given in the old establishment, and what dances of that exclusive circle ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant. But the potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns him in a byword. Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent has been the attitude of his express detractors; those who are very fond of dogs "but in their proper ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... take the risk, if you are. If we don't take it, you know what the result will be. We may make our get-away to the East, or we may stop here for good—under ground. You have little choice either way. If you get out of this country, you'll be down and out. Your name'll be a byword and you'll be flat broke, a joke and an object of contempt the nation over. And it's not only yourself you've got to think of; you've got to consider your wife and daughter, and how they'll stand poverty and disgrace. Against ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... consider not so much the happy English, but rather his poor scabbard and how he should clean it after the march, and his poor clothes, all coated with mud, and needing an hour's brushing, and his poor temper, which, if he did not take great care, would make him grow up to be an anti-militarist and a byword. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... Master bowed him, sorrowing, I heard a great Voice pealing through the heavens, A Voice that dwarfed earth's thunders to a moan:— Woe! Woe! Woe!—to him by whom this came. His house shall unto him be desolate. And, to the end of time, his name shall be A byword and reproach in all the lands He rapined ... And his own shall curse him For the ruin that he brought. Who without reason draws the sword— By sword shall perish! The Lord hath said ... So ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... broken-hearted from the Court to die. James was in fact resolved on a far more terrible vengeance; and the Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels were hanged in what has ever since, been known as the "Bloody Circuit," while Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight hundred were sold into slavery ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... the magazine you have been looking for. It is edited by none other than A. V. Harding, whose name is a byword in the sporting field. Each monthly issue contains 64 to 100 pages chock-full of interesting articles, illustrated with actual photos on FUR FARMING, HUNTING, FISHING, etc. Each issue also has many ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... engine announces to be waiting for us. Our comrades in this adventure are Captain Hoblitzel's company, the 'Swartz-Jaegers,' brawny mechanics, sturdy Teutons, and all of a size. These are Germans, remember, not what we call Hessians; not the kind that are destined to make Pennsylvania a byword; not the kind that advance in clogs but retreat in seven-league boots. We part from our German friends with a rousing cheer, as heartily returned, at a bridge which they are to guard. Then we have the cars to ourselves. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... it in the office, and had lit that lantern and wuz now hangin' along in the rear of that gay procession, with that mummy-like figger, a jest, a byword and a sneer, for laughter riz up round 'em and sneers follered 'em as they swep' onwards. As they come nigh me I riz up almost wildly and ketched holt of my ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... Knowing no social distinctions, Susie was no respecter of persons. She chaffed and flouted the man who wintered a thousand head of cattle with the same impartiality with which she gibed his blushing cowpuncher. Her good-nature was a byword, as were her generosity and boyish daring. Susie MacDonald was a local celebrity in her way, and on the big hay-ranch her lightest word ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... little jewelry, received her guests more like an old-time patrician matron than a notorious modern concubine. Her notoriety, in fact, was due to Flavia Titiana, rather than to any indiscretions of her own. To justify her infidelities, which were a byword, Pertinax' lawful wife went to ingenious lengths to blacken Cornificia's reputation, regaling all society with her invented tales about the lewd attractions Cornificia staged to keep Pertinax held ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... as thou livest, that every sound which is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear. Every proverb, every book, every byword which belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home, through open or winding passages. Every friend, whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... told you of dined three years ago—and a merry day they had of it. I could wish we had a few of the scraps they left. It's cold work sleeping in the open on an empty stomach, but we must just cheer each other with Tone's byword— ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham |
