"Pestilential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... through him that Palestine enjoyed its great peace and prosperity and for these gifts he was truly thankful, and though he feared he might prove tedious, still he would hope that Felix in his great clemency might allow him to say a few further words about a pestilential fellow, an agent of sedition among the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect known as the Nazarenes: one who came to Jerusalem but to profane the Temple, and wishing, he said, to judge him for ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... war appears as a kind of Last Judgment, sentencing folly and sensuality to hell. The shame of France was consumed by the fire of 1870, and her true genius was restored. Abominable as the Boer War was, the mind of England was less pestilential after it than before. Passion purifies, and surely there can be no passion stronger than one which drives you ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... were the Judges all ranged, a Terrible show, in their brave Scarlet Robes and Fur Tippets, with great monstrous Wigs, and the King's Arms behind them under a Canopy, done in Carver's work, gilt. They frowned on us dreadfully when we came trooping into the Dock, bringing all manner of Deadly pestilential Fumes with us from the Gaol yonder, and which not all the rue, rosemary, and marjoram strewn on the Dock-ledge, nor the hot vinegar sprinkled about the Court, could mitigate. The middle Judge, who was old, and had a split lip ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... slave-dealing times, but there is a fair amount of commerce and the commissions of the factors and agents are very large. Bonny stands in a region of swamps, and the climate exhales at all times of the year pestilential vapors which are not at all suited to the white man. Most of the white residents live on board old hulks which are moored to the bank of the river, and they find these hulks less unhealthy than houses off shore, for the reason that they are less exposed to the ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... order," snapped the officer, "do you think, on this pestilential unlucky planet, we can afford any more bad luck? Metals fatigue, Karol burned so badly the medic thinks he may never use his hand again, and now you and Ringg getting yourselves laid up and out of action? ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... "He's a pestilential cur, that has got himself introduced into the family, and the sooner we get quit of him the better. I should think the young lady would hardly fancy him when she knows that he has lied like the very devil, with the object of getting her former lover ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... furniture, an overwhelming majority of pictures and books—one might go on for some time with the list. If our community was collectively anything more than a feeble idiot, it would burn most of London and Chicago, for example, and build sane and beautiful cities in the place of these pestilential heaps of rotten private property. I have failed in presenting Mr. Polly altogether if I have not made you see that he was in many respects an artless child of Nature, far more untrained, undisciplined and spontaneous than an ordinary savage. And he was really glad, for all that little drawback ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... sudden death of his partner, Mr. J. Pacifico, who is lately dead of the plague. I paid him a visit a few hours before his death; I met there Don Pedro de Victoria, who was smoking a segar; he offered me one, and urged me to smoke it. I believe that the smoke of tobacco is anti-pestilential; this, added to the precaution of avoiding contact, and inhalation of the breath of the person infected, appears to be quite sufficient to secure ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... roosters were pecking about or grooming their shiny feathers, all agleam with a metallic rainbow luster. Along the drain from the Gas House a number of women on hands and knees were scrubbing clothes or washing dishes in a pestilential water that stained the stones on its edges black. Here was the frame of a new boat about which some carpenters were pounding, and from a distance the skeleton of unpainted timber looked like the ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... curiosity may be her pleasure, any incident to divert thoughts that make her sensible of her own bereavement. She stops to listen to the denunciations of the crazed prophet, and herself partakes, though callously, of his insanity—half believes, but scarcely feels. The sky is lurid, pestilential; it touches with plague what it illuminates. Such is the picture in its design. The colouring is quite in accordance with the purpose, and completes the sentiment; there is much of a green tone, yet under great variety. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... election of consuls held by Camillus, Marcus Aemilius was chosen of the patricians, and Lucius Sextius the first of the commonalty; and this was the last of all Camillus's actions. In the year following, a pestilential sickness infected Rome, which, besides an infinite number of the common people, swept away most of the magistrates, among whom was Camillus; whose death cannot be called immature, if we consider his ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... because it is so true. However, when he began to lay on with such rhetoric as "the treasures of the nation lavished in wasteful thoughtlessness,"—"thousands of our troops sacrificed wantonly in pestilential swamps of Walcheren," and gave the details we know so well, Ministers wriggled a good one, though 'twas no news to 'em. Castlereagh kept on starting forward as if he were going to jump up and interrupt, taking the strictures entirely as a ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... carried eighteen midshipmen; and as six lieutenants were appointed from them, only twelve remained. From these twelve, in the dingy after-cockpit, where the superficial area was not more than twelve square feet; where the air was foul, and the bilges reeked with a pestilential stench; where the purser's store-room near gave out the smell of rancid butter and poisonous cheese; where the musty taint of old ropes came to them, there was a spirit ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... When a pestilential disease breaks out in the city, the plainness and urgency of the case compel all to see in the sickness of one the danger of all. Wants and discomforts, which charity had been too cold to attend to, now ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... their own vile Carkasses. In every of these you might see them lie in Heaps like little Hills; drown'd indeed, but attended with Stenches so noisome, that it gave the distracted Neighbourhood too great Reason to apprehend yet more fatal Consequences. A Pestilential Infection is the Dread of every Place, but especially of all Parts upon the Mediterranean. The Priests therefore repair'd to a little Chapel, built in the open Fields, to be made use of on such like Occasions, there to deprecate ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... was austere; Barlow felt that he dwelt on a plane where the trivialities of life were but pestilential insects, to be endured stoically in a physical way, with the mind freed from their irritation grasping grander things; life was a wheel that revolved with the certainty ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... case, one could not pass such a manufactory without an involuntary shudder, regarding it as a charnel house, or rather as a Pandora's box, to those wretched beings who are doomed to work or dwell within its pestilential precincts.[51] But in spite of the various and respectable testimony which has been produced by writers opposed to the use of tobacco, we cannot help regarding their statements as exceedingly exaggerated. We have not space to enter into a more minute examination of this portion of our subject, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of the bark, are "berberin" and "oxyacanthin." The sparingly-produced juice of the berries is cooling and astringent. It was formerly held in high esteem by the Egyptians, when diluted as a drink, in pestilential fevers. The inner, yellow bark, which has been long believed to exercise a medicinal effect on the liver, because of its colour, is a true biliary purgative. An infusion of this bark, made with boiling ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... themselves a respectable manhood are the boys who are put to no business, the young men who have nothing to do, the male beings that have no Employment. We have them about us—walking nuisances—pestilential gas-bags—fetid air-bubbles, who burst and are gone. Our men of wealth and character, of worth and power, have been early bound to some useful Employment. Many of them were unfortunate orphan boys, whom want compelled to work for bread—the children of penury and lowly birth. In ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... to foot under a black crape, and being mixed with a breed of renegadoes, are said to be many of them fair and handsome. This city was besieged in 1270, by Lewis (sic) king of France, who died under the walls of it, of a pestilential fever. After his death, Philip, his son, and our prince Edward, son of Henry III. raised the siege on honourable terms. It remained under its natural African kings, till betrayed into the hands of Barbarossa, admiral of Solyman the Magnificent. The emperor Charles ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... leaving Rothiemurchus Banff was reached, and the fugitives were sheltered by a Presbyterian minister, who was a secret adherent of the Stuarts. Johnstone at once took the precaution of exchanging his laced Highland dress for that of an old labourer, 'quite ragged, and exhaling a pestilential odour,' due apparently to its having been used for many years 'when he cleaned the stables of his master.' In this unpleasant disguise, he entered the town of Banff, then garrisoned with four hundred English ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... rock yields and breaks under the drop of water which incessantly falls upon it, so that great nation had to break and to fall into pieces under, not the drop, but the rivers of impure waters which for centuries have incessantly flowed in upon it from the pestilential fountain of the confessional. "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach, to any people." ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... among the many causes of the army's disruption was its losses in prisoners. Not less than 5,000 men were at that moment dying by slow torture in the foul prisons or pestilential floating dungeons of New York. Turn from it as we may, there is no escaping the conviction that if not done with the actual sanction of Sir William Howe, these atrocities were at least committed with his guilty knowledge.[1] The calculated ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... cutting you short before coming to the red, for my unaided memory here suffices me: the red blood of my wounds flowing and clotting on the frozen mud of Argonne that terrible morning in December, 1914; the red mud of pestilential slaughter-houses; the shattered heads of dead comrades; mangled stumps irrigated with peroxide solution so that the living corruption was half hidden by bloodstained foam; red visions glimpsed everywhere in these ghastly ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... nearly famished the first year, and when a better allowance was granted he had wholly lost the power of digestion. He lingered a long time, and when reduced almost to the last extremity, he was removed into a somewhat more airy prison. The pestilential atmosphere of these narrow receptacles, so much resembling real tombs, was doubtless very injurious to others as well as to him. But the remedy sought for was too late or insufficient to remove the cause of his sufferings. He had scarcely been a month in this spacious prison, when, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... there were instances enough to convince the most incredulous that a radical change must be made. Dr. Ackerly, writing in 1822, thus describes the condition of the burial-ground connected with Trinity Church, New York, forty years before: "During the Revolutionary War this ground emitted pestilential vapors, the recollection of which is not obliterated from the memory of a number of living witnesses." In the same year, the Commercial Advertiser published an article in reference to the present evils of earth-burial at the same place, in which it was said: "It will ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... and his voice shed with astounding completeness all its syllabled nicety. "You try to make yourself useful as well as pestilential. Get him a bit of adhesive for that cut. It looks as bad as though a horse ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... impossible for even the most sceptical to doubt the writer's honesty. Wounded and taken prisoner in August, 1914, he suffered severely at the hands of the Germans, and his account of the camp at Wittenburg does nothing to decrease one's loathing for that pestilential spot. For many reasons it gives that a civilized race can sink to such depths of cruelty and cowardice. Perhaps the only people to whom it will give any comfort are those who have sent food and clothing to our prisoners. But I am glad ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... matter, and resolved to take action; and eight of their number dedicated themselves for the service if called upon. A society was formed, and a fund was established to which the people contributed liberally. But the officials at home were cold; they deprecated so uncertain a venture in a pestilential climate. The Presbytery, undaunted, persevered with its preparations, and chose the Rev. Hope M. Waddell to be the first agent ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,—who on week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the pungent, lung-eating vats ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... over a portion of the honorarium given him by a grateful country in return for exposing his life at the call of duty; but, on his suddenly succumbing to the effects of a murderous slug shot through the lungs, fired from the old flint musket of one of the King of Abarri's adherents, in the pestilential African stream up which he had gone to demolish a native stronghold that had defied the fetish of the British flag, this allowance for my support ceased, and I was thenceforth left a poor pensioner on my uncle's ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the Eastern world, and brings them into touch with our Western civilization and its love of law for the sake of the law rather than for fear of the law's punishments. It stands guard upon the outer frontiers of civilization, in pestilential climates, often exposed to noisome disease, performing duties that are beyond the public observation but yet which have their happy influence in maintaining the reputation and character of our country and extending the civilizing agency of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... so much desert, gladdened indeed our eyes. This was a fine sheet of water, of great extent, covered with a forest of luxurious trees. It was a genuine Soudan picture, and we gazed at it with delight. I nevertheless thought of the pestilential exhalations of the stagnant pools further on in Soudan. The ground holds the water tightly, for wells are sunk near it of some depth before water is reached. This pool, or lake, dries up during the heat of summer, as is proved by the ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... relief of it. The cold reward. Allan Mowbray was avenged. Jessie and her mother were freed from the threat which had so long over-shadowed their lives. The bitter air of the northland had been cleansed of a pestilential breath. So he turned his back on Leaping Horse with the knowledge that the murderer would pay his penalty before God ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... is a chameleon in man's clothing. He breathes air, he eats air, he speaks air; and a most pestilential breath it is. Only observe how he is pouring its fumes into the ear ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... necessary knowledge for the abolition of revolutions and wars and manifold other plagues, which originate from the influence of destroying spirits, who themselves may be so ignorant, that the magnetic fluid which they communicate to men is pestilential, as a man who is infected with one or the other kind of plague, may be ignorant of his dreadful condition, and of the fact that he infects also others who, in their ignorance of matters, are united with his deleterious condition. If, for instance, the Emperors of Austria and France, and their Generals ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... occasion. I gazed on the procession till it was out of sight; and when the last wheeze of the clarionet died upon my ear, I could not help thinking how happy were they who were thus to dwell together in the peaceful bosom of their native village, far from the gilded misery and the pestilential vices of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... opposed to him: they had at first begun to feel disgust that this gift had been extended from the citizens to the allies, and thus rendered common: in the next place they frequently heard the consul Verginius in the assemblies as it were prophesying, that the gift of his colleague was pestilential: that those lands were sure to bring slavery to those who received them: that the way was being paved to a throne. Else why were it that the allies were thus included, and the Latin nation? What ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... To seek out an individual here and there and endeavor to redeem or recover him while the environment remains unchanged, is a waste of force: as foolish as it would be to spend millions on remedies for people sick with malaria in a pestilential and malarial district, and ignore the condition of the district. True wisdom would demand first of all that the district be purged, the environment made healthy, the cause ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... daresay is an unconscious mesmeriser. The other day our poor Maohn was terrified by a communication from Ali Bey (Moudir of Keneh) to the effect that he had heard from Alexandria that someone had reported that the dead cattle had lain about the streets of Luxor and that the place was pestilential. The British mind at once suggested a counter-statement, to be signed by the most respectable inhabitants. So the Cadi drew it up, and came and read it to me, and took my deposition and witnessed my signature, and the Maohn went his way rejoicing, in that ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... of talk. I have heard too often that kind of slang about New England. I heard it here for ten years, when your Barksdales, and your Keitts's, and your other Traitors, now in arms against the Government, filled these Halls with their pestilential assaults not only upon New England, but on ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... literary distinction, along with friends, home, the safety and happiness of civilized society, that she might take up the cross, and carry it, an offering of salvation, to the benighted Heathen of Asia, even in the depths of their own far and pestilential climates. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... children of this very industrious race would manage to make it wave with cornfields. Another agricultural colony, by way of contrast, should be established a couple of days' journey south of Aleppo, where the river loses itself in pestilential and malarious swamps. Arabs could not live there, but who knew whether those hardy Armenians (the women and children, of them at least who had proved themselves robust enough to reach the place) would not flourish there out of harm's way? After the swamps one came to the ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... surveyed the wonderful scene with the same exultation as their descendants. Some of them would have denied that these great centers of industrial democracy either in the Old World or in the New always stand for progress. Jefferson said, "I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man. I consider the class of artificers," he went on, "as the panders of vice, and the instrument by which the liberties of a country are generally ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... drained from the hillside along a dirty channel filled with animal refuse. The wells were below the ground level, and were walled and domed over to prevent too rapid an evaporation by the sun's rays. The water was pestilential. It had a nasty green look about it, and patches of putrid matter decomposing visibly on its surface. The stench from it when stirred was sickening. Yet the natives drank it and found it all right! There is no accounting for people's taste, ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... from my digression. We must keep our boys, as I said, from association with all bad men, but especially from flatterers. For, as I have often said to parents, and still say, and will constantly affirm, there is no race more pestilential, nor more sure to ruin youths swiftly, than the race of flatterers, who destroy both parents and sons root and branch, making the old age of the one and the youth of the others miserable, holding ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... familiarity With open forms of ill, not to be shunned Where youths of all kinds meet, endangered there A mind more willing to be pure than most— Oft when the broad rich humour of a jest, Did, with its breezy force, make radiant way For pestilential vapours following— Arose within his sudden silent mind, The maiden face that smiled and blushed on him; That lady face, insphered beyond his earth, Yet visible to him as any star That shines unwavering. I cannot tell In words the tenderness that glowed across His bosom—burned ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... have thought nothing more about it had there not appeared a few lines on the subject in a weekly newspaper called the "Brotherton Church," which was held to be a pestilential little rag by all the Close. Deans, canons, and minor canons were all agreed as to this, Dr. Pountner hating the "Brotherton Church" quite as sincerely as did the Dean. The "Brotherton Church" was edited nominally by a certain Mr. Grease,—a ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... to the pestilential fuddy-duds who do not approve of tobacco, particularly the fussy-old-maids. Personally, when I hear any of these conscientious objectors to My Lady Nicotine air their opinions, I wish that they could be placed in the trenches for a while. They would soon change their ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... that I begged to be allowed to follow, pleading the black blood that I now knew to circulate in my veins: to all my appeals he turned a deaf ear, and, bending back a portion of the screen of bushes, disappeared into the pestilential silence of the swamp. ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... or epatl, as the Indians call it, and which Bouffon mentions under the generic name of mouffetes. It looks like a brown and white fox, with an enormous tail, which it holds up like a great feather in the air. It is known not only for the beauty of its skin, but for the horrible and pestilential odour with which it defends itself when attacked, and which poisons the air for miles around. Notwithstanding the warnings of the mozos as to its peculiar mode of defence, the gentlemen pursued it with guns and pistols, on horseback and on foot, but fired in vain. The beast seemed bullet-proof; ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... then in Pannonia, finally on the borders of the Marne and the Po, ravaging the beautiful plains where, from the time of Antwor, the genius of man had accumulated monuments upon monuments. Thus blew from the Mongolian desert a pestilential wind which, even as far as the Cisalpine plains, blighted the delicate flower of art, the object of cares so constant ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... Dashed the hot war-horse on. These spots of excavation tell The ravage of the bursting shell - And feel'st thou not the tainted steam, That reeks against the sultry beam, From yonder trenched mound? The pestilential fumes declare That Carnage has replenished ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... do her utmost for his rescue, but we cannot wonder at her feeling that great fundamental, preventive measures must be taken by the church and society to wipe out the city slums and all that they stand for of pestilential evil. ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... understood when, many years after, in the 8th of his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner- party broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after a certain point,—"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat, more venomous than that of African vipers, had ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... seen was a fringe of thick, low trees, the edge of the forest that ran back from the river. Conspicuous among them was the ill-omened "fever tree," with its gaunt, bare, ungainly arms and yellow bark—the tree whose presence indicates a pestilential air. Here was no luxuriant variety of form, no wealth of colour, no festooned creepers nor brilliant flowers, but a dull and sad monotony, as we doubled point after point and saw reach after reach ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... I had not read too much about them, and therefore was able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... patient; I engaged a careful woman-prisoner as a nurse, and Mr. Norton supplied them with money and necessaries. These helps were barely sufficient to preserve them from the horrors of despair, when they saw their little darling panting under the rage of a loathsome pestilential malady, during the excessive heat of the dog-days, and struggling for breath in the noxious atmosphere of a confined cabin, where they scarce had room to turn on the most necessary occasions. The eager curiosity with which the mother ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... prosperity in state, county, or town without the dram-shops." The brewers and distillers say, "It enhances the value of property and products of all kinds." The fools answer, with idiotic promptness and docility, "Yes, we must continue this ulcerous cancer upon the body politic—this unclean, pestilential, gangrenous sore, reeking with disease, vice, poverty, madness, to increase the price of grain." Yes, gentlemen, grain is more profitable deposited in the stomach of your son or your neighbor's son, in the form of whisky, mixed with sundry deadly drugs to give it "tone," than in pork, beef, ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... lives of the people of the West were made wretched by the inundation of these animals, and many of the largest farmers in the county of Kent have been compelled to leave their beautiful farms, because of the pestilential swarthy swarms.—What were these wretches fit for? Nothing. They cooked our victuals and shampooned us; but who would not rather that these duties should be performed by white men? The blacks were a worthless, useless, thriftless set of beings—they were too indolent, lazy and ignorant ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the Commons deal grudgingly with a prince who had done more for England than had ever been done for her by any of his predecessors in so short a time, with a prince who was now about to expose himself to hostile weapons and pestilential air in order to preserve the English colony in Ireland, with a prince who was prayed for in every corner of the world where a congregation of Protestants could meet for the worship of God? [597] But on this subject Lowther harangued in vain. Whigs and Tories were equally fixed in the opinion ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this simple act, the entire social community will experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... approaching the door of the assembly, gave the war-whoop, which was answered by a few in the galleries of the house, where the crowded assembly was convened. Silence was commanded, and prudent and peaceable deportment again enjoined. The savages repaired to the ships which contained the pestilential tea, and had begun their ravages previous to the dissolution ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... soldiers, sailors, and Arabs, and we had to share a most miserable berth with eight other occupants. We had arrived too late to procure cabin places, and were obliged to dine in an unsavoury den, reeking with pestilential odours. Most of the Frenchmen grumbled loudly at the miserable accommodation afforded in return for their money. Steaming along past a fine coast, we reached Dellis about eight o'clock. I got Angelo to bring me my sheepskin and cloak, and preferred ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... unpleasantly but not unbearably hot in the summer months, is pestilential and deadly during the rains, when malaria and the more dreaded black-water fever take toll of the strongest. Noreen had suffered in health in the hot weather, and her brother was seriously concerned at the thought of her ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... property from such violence, the commonwealth then is become totally perverted from its purposes; neither God nor man will long endure it; nor will it long endure itself. In that case there is an unnatural infection, a pestilential taint fermenting in the constitution of society, which fever and convulsions of some kind or other must throw off; or in which the vital powers, worsted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and, by a reversal ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... worse than all, the pestilential breed! Flies kill more men than bullets. Flies were surely invented by ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... exaggerates and hurls his thunders on flowers. He entreats the magistrates not to suffer foreign romances to be scattered amongst the people, but to lay on them heavy penalties, as on prohibited goods; and represents this prevailing taste as being more pestilential than the plague itself. He has drawn a striking picture of a family devoted to romance-reading; he there describes women occupied day and night with their perusal; children just escaped from the lap of their nurse grasping in their little hands the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... thousand feet below the level of the Mediterranean, that is, below what we speak of as "sea level." In this respect it is unique in the geography of the world. In winter time the climate is equable; in summer it is unbearable. In peace time, even the Bedouin forsake it in summer. The district is pestilential to a degree, and, in no sense of the word, a white man's country. It possesses a feature of considerable importance in the river Jordan itself, almost the only river in Palestine with a perennial flow. The river is tortuous and rapid and ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... Pontine marshes—a country at once fertile and pestilential,—where, with all the fecundity of nature, a single habitation is not to be found. Some sickly men change your horses, recommending to you not to sleep in passing the marshes; for sleep there is really the harbinger of death. The ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... {better} befits my shoulders; I, who am able to give unerring wounds to the wild beasts, {wounds} to the enemy, who lately slew with arrows innumerable the swelling Python, that covered so many acres {of land} with his pestilential belly. Do thou be contented to excite I know not what flames with thy torch; and do not lay claim to praises {properly} ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... they have only to steal off to the Rocky Mountains, and there no jurisdiction can touch them. And then, sir, think of flying for debt! A set of bailiffs, mounted on bomb-shells, would not overtake an absconded debtor, only give him a fair start. Upon the whole, sir, it is a pestilential, topsy-turvy, harum-scarum whirligig. Give me the old, solemn, straightforward, regular Dutch canal—three miles an hour for expresses, and two for ordinary journeys, with a yoke of oxen for a heavy load! I go for beasts ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... man who insists on premarital sexual necessity has two roads open to him—one that of the libertine and seducer, the most contemptible of creatures; the other that of the whore-follower, whom nature perpetually menaces with vile and pestilential plagues, making him a misery to himself and menace to all clean persons who associate with him, especially his ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... no sooner than they are attack'd with the violent Fevers, and the Burning which attends that Distemper, fling themselves over Head in the Water, in the very Extremity of the Disease; which shutting up the Pores, hinders a kindly Evacuation of the pestilential Matter, and drives it back; by which Means Death most commonly ensues; not but in other Distempers which are epidemical, you may find among 'em Practitioners that have extraordinary Skill and Success in removing those morbifick Qualities which afflict 'em, not often going above 100 Yards from ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... that goose Melie, was becoming repugnant with its filth and coarseness. An abominable repast was served them, an omelette with hairs in it, and cutlets smelling of grease, in the centre of the common room, to which an open window admitted the pestilential odour of a dung heap, while the place was so full of flies that they positively blackened the tables. The heat of the burning afternoon came in with the stench, and Claude and Sandoz did not even feel the courage to ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Of thunder roars among the rocks below. There, black as night, an awful cave they show, The gorge of Dis. Dread Acheron from beneath Bursts in a whirlpool, with its waves of woe, And jaws that gape with pestilential death. There plunged the hateful Fiend, and earth and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... blue-eyed Sultana would doubtless expiate the crime of "lighting up her heart" at the shrine of affection, by being closed in a sack and thrown into the lake. But, I felt persuaded, there was something English, in the tones of your voice. Did you forsake Old Albion for the sultry, pestilential ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... which it was erected. Here we surveyed its rock-hewn seats, capable of accommodating an audience larger than that of all the theaters of New York; but there was no longer a voice to cry, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" The sea has forsaken the harbor, which is now a pestilential morass. We passed through the ruins of the custom-house, now miles inland, and found a single Turkish soldier on guard. The peasants who cultivate some parts of the plain come from distant villages, and fever, filth, and beggary reign ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Didst thou not come to release me? Wouldst thou brand me with dishonor—with infamy and shame? Betray me not. O God! canst thou think of deserting me now! Listen! The foreigner is already on his way to sully with his hot and pestilential breath the purity of thy beloved. And what would be my future fate shouldst thou deliver me into the hands of mine enemy, to his hated embraces? He will force me to the court of the King of the South. I must there bear my part amid strange faces, surrounded by falsehood and pride, and learn ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... wife at Port Louis, embarked for Madagascar, in order to purchase a few slaves to assist him in forming a plantation in this island. He landed at that unhealthy season which commences about the middle of October: and soon after his arrival died of the pestilential fever, which prevails in that country six months of the year, and which will forever baffle the attempts of the European nations to form establishments on that fatal soil. His effects were seized upon by the rapacity of strangers; and his wife, who was pregnant, ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... one or two women of the lower classes, without bonnets, the elder ones with white caps, the younger bareheaded. I have hardly seen a lady in Marseilles; and I suspect, it being a commercial city, and dirty to the last degree, ill-built, narrow-streeted, and sometimes pestilential, there are few or no ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... caverns of earth are filled with pestilential dust which once was the bones, the flesh, the bodies of great ones who sate upon thrones, deciding causes, ruling assemblies, governing armies, conquering provinces, possessing treasures, tearing down temples, flattering themselves with pride, majesty, fortune, praise and dominion. These glories ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... dangerous and reactionary—and therefore wrong—to insist upon strikes or other forms of class warfare in moments of great calamity, as, for example, during disasters like the Johnstown flood and the Messina earthquake, or amid the ravages of a pestilential plague. Marx, to whom we owe the formulation of the theory of class struggle which has guided the Socialist movement, would never have questioned this important truth; he would never have supported ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... on Mr Robertson, a merchant, for whom I had brought a letter of introduction from England. This old gentleman took me for a drive in his buggy at 6 P.M. It appears that at this time of year the country outside the city is quite pestilential, for when we reached the open, Mr Robertson pointed to a detached house and said, "Now, I am as fond of money as any Jew, yet I wouldn't sleep in that house for one night if you gave it to ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... from you accurate information respecting your wants; you are, besides, invited to partake of our table, all the time we shall pass together: the Major, and all the officers, beg you to remain here, and not to go to the pestilential camp at Deccard, where a mortal distemper would carry you off in a few days." It would be ungrateful not to name these two young officers: one bears the name of Beurthonne, without being a relation of the Governors; the name of the ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... wandering, that which followed on the old Sparwehr. We were in quest of new lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty kept charnel-house together. That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golconda—ay, he sought old ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... professions of his whole life, to desert the royal cause, to join with the Wildmans and Fergusons, nay, to propose that the King should be sent a prisoner to a foreign land and immured in a fortress begirt by pestilential marshes. The lure which had produced this strange transformation was the Viceroyalty of Ireland. Soon, however, it appeared that the proselyte had little chance of obtaining the splendid prize on which his ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... immediately cry out, "God save my children!" well knowing it was the harbinger of the death of some one of them, which melancholy news was sure to be confirmed very shortly after. During her very dangerous illness at Metz, where she caught a pestilential fever, either from the coal fires, or by visiting some of the nunneries which had been infected, and from which she was restored to health and to the kingdom through the great skill and experience of that modern AEsculapius, M. de Castilian her physician—I ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... Berlin or Dresden. These and similar large towns, with their public, do not exist for me at all. As an audience I can only imagine an assembly of friends who have come together for the purpose of knowing my works somewhere or other, best of all in some beautiful solitude, far from the smoke and pestilential business odour of our town civilization. Such a solitude I might find in Weimar, but certainly not in a larger city. If I now turn to my great work, it is done for the purpose of seeking salvation from my misery, forgetfulness of my life. I have no other aim, and shall think myself happy ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... To the purple clouds of sunset! "He it was who slew my father, By his wicked wiles and cunning, When he from the moon descended, When he came on earth to seek me. He, the mightiest of Magicians, Sends the fever from the marshes, Sends the pestilential vapors, Sends the poisonous exhalations, Sends the white fog from the fen-lands, Sends disease and death among us! "Take your bow, O Hiawatha, Take your arrows, jasper-headed, Take your war-club, Puggawaugun, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... one to pay the piper in compassing its extinction? If, however, it really be that Upas—tree, under whose baleful shade every kindly feeling in the human bosom, whether of master or servant, withers and dies, I ask, who planted it? If it possess the magical, and incredible, and most pestilential quality, that the English gentleman, who shall be virtuous and beneficent, and just in all his ways, before he leaves home, and after he returns home, shall, during his temporary sojourn within its influence become a very Nero for cruelty, and have his warm heart ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... news'll spread almost as fast as through the papers. So here's how we'll fix them. Recommend the City Council to pass an ordinance making it a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, and revocation of license to practice, for a physician to make a diagnosis of any case as a pestilential disease. The Council will do ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to the sound of birds and scent of thyme and twinkling of dewdrops on the grass around. Meanwhile ague, fever, and death have been stalking all night long about the plain, within a few yards of their couch, and not one pestilential breath has reached the charmed precincts of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... there, where the plague had actually touched her, and in fancy she could hear her gasping and begging for a drink of water like the dying wretches to whom her fate had led her. And then—then came the servants of the senate and shut her into the pestilential house with the sick; she saw the pest in mortal form, a cruel and malignant witch; behind her, tall and threatening, stood her inexorable companion Death, reaching out a bony hand and clutching her mother, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... dear Furius, if my villa faces, 'Tis not showery south, nor airy wester, North's grim fury, nor east; 'tis only fifteen Thousand sesterces, add two hundred over. Draft unspeakable, icy, pestilential! 5 ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... has not heard in this enlightened age, When all can criticise the historic page, Who has not heard in James's Bigot Reign Of Jefferies! monarch of the scourge, and chain, Jefferies the wretch whose pestilential breath, Like the dread Simoom, winged the shaft of Death; The old, the young to Fate remorseless gave Nor spared one victim ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... almost more than human wisdom to adjust it. It was one of those matters which almost seemed to require the interposition of some higher power,—the coming of some apparently chance event,—to clear away the evil; as a fire comes, and pestilential alleys are removed; as a famine comes, and men are driven from want and ignorance and dirt to seek new homes and new thoughts across the broad waters; as a war comes, and slavery is banished from the face of the earth. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... divine of her to think of his comfort. The thought of her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the new musical insanity known as "jazz"—so pestilential a music that even the fiddlers ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... consists of a relentless exposure of the deformity and folly of vice. Here the foul souls of Wild and his associates, stripped of all the glamour of picturesque crime, stand displayed in their essential qualities, with the result that even the pestilential air of thieves' slums, of 'night cellars,' and of Newgate purlieus, an air which hangs so heavy over every page, falls back into insignificance before the loathsomeness of the central figure. A few years later, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... heart, is made the subject of vulgar huckstering, a means of buying a livelihood; and worse than the prostitution of the streets is that of the marriage for a livelihood sanctioned by law and custom, because under its pestilential poison-breath not only the dignity and happiness of the living, but the sap and strength of future generations are blasted and destroyed. As love, that sacred instinct which should lead the wife into the arms of the husband, united ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... time there were two highwaymen, Charlie and Crabb Spring; two men, not highway, Saul Coplestone and John Cole; two marriageable sisters, Sarah and Christina Rowland. The highwaymen, being pestilential and murderous, badly wanted catching; of the two potential heroes, Saul was a stout enough fellow on the surface but a poltroon at bottom, while John, though less terrific in physique, was modest and courageous to a degree. Of the sisters, Sarah had most of the looks and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... the question being put to him, he frankly admitted that he was one of them. He was therefore despoiled of all he possessed, and banished into perpetual exile and slavery. He was sent in chains to a pestilential part of the island, with the intention that toil and disease should end his life. So secretly and promptly was he spirited away that no one could tell the precise locality to which he had been banished. His heart-broken wife and child were also sold, ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... without action or change in the situation. Meanwhile as Antony's camp had been placed in a pestilential spot for midsummer heat, he suffered great losses from disease. By this time Cleopatra was interested in nothing but a return to Egypt. Accordingly she persuaded Antony to order a naval battle without asking anybody's advice, and he set the date August 29 for the sally of his fleet. The Romans ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... the tried honour and clemency of Scipio, sent his brother Mandonius to him; who, falling prostrate before his knees, ascribed his conduct to the fatal frenzy of those times, when, as it were from the effects of some pestilential contagion, not only the Ilergetians and Lacetanians, but even the Roman camp had been infected with madness. He said that his own condition, and that of his brother and the rest of his countrymen, was such, that either, if it seemed ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... time he lacked confidence in himself. The word charlatan clung to him like a pestilential memory. His hair was cropped close to his head. He had shaved off his moustache. He imitated almost slavishly the attire and bearing of those young men of fashion with whom he was brought into contact. Yet he was somehow conscious ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a muddy, polluted, pestilential river, instead of allowing it to resolve itself into a million irrigating-ditches, has been the fight of the centuries. The trouble is that irrigation is not an end—it is just a beginning. Irrigation means constant and increasing effort, and priests and preachers have never ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... uninteresting district. We stopped for tiffin by a broad stream bordered by willows. The grass was good, but the flies were so maddening that the poor ponies hardly grazed at all. Hot as it was, I thought they were better off moving than in this pestilential spot, but it was impossible to get Ivan started. For hours he slept and drank, while the horses twitched their skins and switched their tails and stamped their feet, and between times tried to snatch a bite. Poor-looking women and ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... contrast this frigid power of the north and south with that of the sun; examine the parched lands of the torrid zone, replete with sulphureous exhalations; view those countries of Asia subject to pestilential infections which lay nature waste; view this globe often convulsed both from within and without; pouring forth from several mouths, rivers of boiling matter, which are imperceptibly leaving immense subterranean graves, wherein millions will one day perish! Look at the poisonous soil of the equator, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... to men; for women and children kept pace with the army, trading in every possible article of necessity or luxury. For these—disciples of the dime and the dollar—war had no terrors. They took their muck-rakes, like the man in Bunyan, and gathered the almighty coppers, from the pestilential ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... expose our breasts, exposed ten thousand times before, to the balls and scymetars of the infidels, and to fall gloriously for Greece. But we will not die in heaps, like dogs poisoned in summer-time, by the pestilential air of that city—we dare not ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... rung, Of Xanti's* everlasting tongue, [Footnote: Xanti, a nick-name of Xantippe, that scold of glorious memory, who never let poor Socrates have one moment's peace of mind; yet with unexampled patience he bore her pestilential tongue. I shall beg the ladies' pardon if I insert a few passages concerning her: and at the same time I assure them it is not to lesson those of the present age, who are possessed of the like laudable talents; for I will confess, that I know three in the city of Dublin, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... inherent diseases, which are permanent. The science of pathology teaches what these are. They are manifold, such as diseases whereby the whole body is so far infected that the contagion may prove fatal; of this nature are malignant and pestilential fevers, leprosies, the venereal disease, gangrenes, cancers, and the like; also diseases whereby the whole body is so far weighed down, as to admit of no consociability, and from which exhale dangerous effluvia ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg |
