"Unenviable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bound for Mobile, where he intended establishing a mercantile house in connection with a gentleman named Waldron, a native of Portsmouth, who had resided several years in Charleston. I had one brief interview with him, but no opportunity offered of entering into the details of my unenviable position on board the John. On a hint from me that I was dissatisfied, and should not object to accompany him in the Edwin, he gravely shook his head, and remarked that such a course would be unusual and improper; that he was about to retire from the sea; that it would be best for me to ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... to death. Not only has he been care-free and happy, but he has lived! And from the knowledge that he has idled and is still alive, he achieves a new outlook on life; and the more he experiences the unenviable lot of the poor worker, the more the blandishments of the "road" take hold of him. And finally he flings his challenge in the face of society, imposes a valorous boycott on all work, and joins the far-wanderers of Hoboland, the gypsy folk of this ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... his being ragged and dirty affect his social reception to his discomfort. But the accumulated facts of the oddity of his personal appearance, his supposed imbecility, and the bad character borne by his mother, placed him in a very unenviable relation to the tyrannical and vulgar-minded amongst them. Concerning his person, he was long, and, as his name implied, lean, with pale-red hair, reddish eyes, no visible eyebrows or eyelashes, and very pale ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... through the necessity of defending, for fifteen years, an unenviable position between Isobel and Gyp, developed an unusual amount of assertiveness, was what his uncle fondly called "quite a boy." But the dignity of his first long trousers, at one glance, fell before the boyish mischievousness ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... assume that the designation of the city as Uruk supri, "the walled Erech," [115] rests upon this tradition. He is also associated with the great temple Eanna, "the heavenly house," in Erech. To Gilgamesh belongs also the unenviable tradition of having exercised his rule in Erech so harshly that the people are impelled to implore Aruru to create a rival who may rid the district of the cruel tyrant, who is described as snatching sons and daughters from their families, and in other ways terrifying ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... In this unenviable state of mental anxiety, and corporeal lassitude, was our justly renowned hero, at the period of those preparations being completed, which were calculated to display him, in the view of an enraptured people, as the greatest and most felicitous of mortals; nor did ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... your own peregrinations if you care to. I believe they follow a vicious circle bisecting the semi-fashionable world, and the—other. Shall we say that the expression, unenviable notoriety, summarises the reputation you ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... a blazing fire, in the lazy comforts of convalescence, with pipe and tobacco at his elbow, presented a not unenviable picture when contrasted ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... test. It was for the judges to do this. We maintain that nothing that the public will accept as a decision has been reached, and on behalf of the public we protest that the managers have not only placed themselves in a very unenviable position by their action in the premises, but have done a lasting injury to the American Institute, the results of which will be disastrously ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... gave way to despair. There are few conditions in life so utterly unenviable as penury and love—to be next door to starving, and at the same time in love. Day after day Shiel, who was thus afflicted, had revelled in Gladys's company, and had intoxicated himself with her beauty, fully aware that for each moment of pleasure there would, ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... of the Intendant had unsettled every good resolution she had once made to marry Le Gardeur de Repentigny and become a reputable matron in society. Her ambitious fantasies dimmed every perception of duty to her own heart as well as his; and she had worked herself into that unenviable frame of mind which possesses a woman who cannot resolve either to consent or deny, to accept her lover ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... die by scores. One of their favorite remedies, when the scourge first makes its appearance, is to plunge into the nearest river, by which they think to purify themselves. This course, however, in reality, tends to shorten their existence. When the small pox rages among the Aborigines, a most unenviable position is held by their "Medicine Man." He is obliged to give a strict account of himself; and, if so unfortunate as to lose a chief, or other great personage, is sure to pay the penalty by parting with his own life. The duties of the "Medicine ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... obvious that as long as they were kept and continued to matter, the Secretary of Defense would be saddled with the task of deciding in the end which racial tag to attach to each man in the armed forces. It was an unenviable duty, and it could be performed ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... "The unenviable reputation, throughout the length and breadth of the land, in regard to the divorce law, has heaped ignominy on the State of Nevada. A few unscrupulous members of the legal fraternity, little better than ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... our Officers from a neighbourhood which has, by reason of the atrocities perpetrated in it, obtained an unenviable renown, even among similar ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... her, and had told me that she was dead in order that her past life might be obliterated. The doctor, however, died before the marriage, and Rosanna did not trouble herself about undeceiving me. She was then acting on the burlesque stage under the name of 'Musette,' and seemed to have gained an unenviable notoriety by her extravagance and infamy. Whyte met her in London, and she became his mistress. He seemed to have had a wonderful influence over her, for she told him all her past life, and about her marriage with ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... complimentary to her niece-in-law. Mabel's marriage was the signal for a radical reorganization of the Ridgeley domestic establishment, by which Mrs. Sutton was reduced from the busy, responsible situation of housekeeper to the unenviable one ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... who from sheer incapacity were relaxing their strain on the traces. And his position was not pleasant even when he knew, for to tell any of these brave people that they must turn back was a most unenviable [Page 165] task. Thus it came about that all six of them marched on, though Scott was sure that better progress would have been made had the ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... poison;" little aware that no habit is so progressive, and that he who begins with the little, will rapidly pass on to the much! I am also additionally urged to these mournful disclosures, from their forming one portion only, of Mr. Coleridge's life. It has been my unenviable lot, to exhibit my friend in his lowest points of depression; conflicting with unhallowed practices, and, as the certain ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... a prey to feelings which I shall make no further effort to expound; for this interview had not altered, but only intensified them; and in any case they must be obvious to those who take the trouble to conceive themselves in my unenviable position. ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... standing in groups. Sterling Hopkins, the volunteer hangman of Casey, of the Vigilance police, came up and attempted the arrest of Reub. Maloney, a notorious politician, whose impudence of speech and reckless ways in partisan devices had made him an unenviable reputation. His bravery was in his mouth; his mouth beyond his own control. Judge David S. Terry, then of the State Supreme Court, interposed to prevent the lawless arrest, and in the struggle he drew a knife and dangerously wounded Hopkins. In a few minutes word had reached the Committee headquarters, ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... that once upon a time he had seen Black Madge, who was the daughter of a Frenchwoman by an Italian father; Black Madge, who had already made an unenviable record for herself on both ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... confess, but I am convinced that you are the cause of it... Listen: you think, perhaps, that I am looking for rank or immense wealth—be undeceived, my daughter's happiness is my sole desire. Your present position is unenviable, but it may be bettered: you have means; my daughter loves you; she has been brought up in such a way that she will make her husband a happy man. I am wealthy, she is my only child... Tell me, what is keeping you back?... You see, I ought not to be saying all this to you, but I rely upon your ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... of the queen's birthday, but that I had a most beautiful trimming worked me for it by Miss Cambridge, who half fatigued herself to death, for the kind pleasure that I should have my decorations from her hands. If in some points my lot has been unenviable, what a constant solace, what sweet and soft amends, do I find and feel in the almost unexampled union of kindness and excellence ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... appeared to be no one on whom he could visit his wrath. Dismissing the under-gardeners curtly, he was forced to return to his work in a very unenviable frame of mind, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... 1572.[50] By about this time there had arrived in Salamanca Diego Gonzalez—an experienced official, whose conduct of the Inquisitionary case against Bartolome de Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, has earned him an unenviable repute.[51] Under the presidency of Gonzalez, who might be trusted to keep the weaker brethren, if there were any, up to the mark, the local Inquisition on March 15 resolved to recommend the arrest of Luis de Leon. Apparently the gravity of this step was ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... two drawbacks in the least considerable. The first was my terror of the hobbledehoy girls, to whom (from the demands of my situation) I was obliged to lay myself so open. The other, if less momentous, was more mortifying. In early days, at my mother's knee, as a man may say, I had acquired the unenviable accomplishment (which I have never since been able to lose) of singing Just before the Battle. I have what the French call a fillet of voice, my best notes scarce audible about a dinner-table, and the upper register rather to be regarded ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Honor was certainly in a most unenviable frame of mind. She considered that Vivian had treated her unfairly in assuming her to be guilty ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... as in Committee of the Whole, having been concurred in, etc., the Joint Resolution, as originally reported by the Judiciary Committee, was at last passed, (April 8th)—by a vote of 38 yeas to 6 nays—Messrs. Hendricks and McDougall having the unenviable distinction of being the only two Senators, (mis-)representing Free States, who voted against this ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... see it. History attached to it, romance threw a halo round, there were many stories associated with it, some true, others doubtful, the more doubtful the more interesting. Murder had been committed within its walls in the time of the first Edward; and even down to the Georges; it possessed an unenviable reputation for ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... occurred, was an unenviable one, for he was placed in the cruel dilemma of either remaining in a home where his presence was not agreeable to the host and hostess, or abruptly leaving without having an understanding with the one he so dearly loved. He chose the latter alternative, and burning with indignation, ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... of Salisbury, happily for the citizens, has not been very stirring, apart from the few incidents already briefly mentioned. Executions in the Market Place seem to have had an unenviable notoriety. The most dramatic of these was the beheading of the Duke of Buckingham in 1484. A headless skeleton dug up in 1835 during alterations to the "Saracen's Head," formerly the "Blue Boar," was popularly supposed to be his, though records ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... credibility to anything which has been advanced concerning the supreme position of Adriano Lemmi, who, further, himself denies it, and, whatever his past history, is as much entitled to belief as accusers who betray their true character in this unenviable manner. ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... the eyes of all Europe, as well as of the French people themselves, immediately connected with the disappearance of Napoleon—we shall have some faint conception of that mass of multifarious griefs and resentments, in the midst of which the unwieldy and inactive Louis occupied, ere long, a most unenviable throne—and on which the eagle-eyed Exile of Elba gazed with reviving hope even before the summer of 1814 ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... have lived through other experiences and have seen much I cannot pretend to explain or understand; but, so far in my life, I have only once come across a human being who suggested a disagreeable familiarity with unholy things, and who made me feel uncanny and 'creepy' in his presence; and that unenviable ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... would have them arrested and taken care of. Some of the pirates happened to hear this remark, and as soon as it was generally known, created the greatest consternation among them, and upon arriving at Kelley's Island and not receiving the messenger promised by Cole, they were in a very unenviable position. To go to Sandusky they would be arrested; the only course they could take to save their own lives and liberty, was that which they eventually adopted. Capt. Beall, after hearing this report, quickly determined to seize the vessel, which was accordingly ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... had tried. He was accompanied by his chum Margetson, who certainly had the advantage of his friend in looks, as well as in intellect. The quartet was completed by Gus Burke, one of the smallest and most vicious boys at Randlebury. He was the son of a country squire, who had the unenviable reputation of being one of the hardest drinkers and fastest riders in his county; and the boy had already shown himself only too apt a pupil in the lessons in the midst of which his childhood had been passed. He had at his tongue's tip all the slang of the stables ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... lunched with the Governor General, Mr. Gohr, the Director of Justice—who at present is in the unenviable position of having many critics in Europe, usually imperfectly informed of the details and evidence laid before the judges—Mr. Vandamme, who knows everyone and everything connected with the State, Commandant and Madame Sillye, Judge and Madame Webber, and some others. Afterwards, Mr. Webber, ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... him they are in the palace; they have not only told her of the dead Orestes, but have shown him to her; Aegisthus himself can see the unenviable sight; he can rejoice at it, if there is any joy in it. Exulting, he sings a note of triumph at the removal of his fears and threatens to chastise all who try henceforth to thwart his will. He dashes open the door, and there sees the Queen lying dead. Orestes bids him enter the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... forcibly than in this book in the treatment of the subject of riots and mob violence. It may not be generally known, especially among the younger portion of the community, that no American and but few European cities have such an unenviable and disgraceful record on this head as Baltimore. The accounts of its riots remind one too forcibly of the worst days of the French Revolution, and all of them read more like the incidents so plentiful ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... such a statement implies so wide a knowledge of contrasted civilizations that to most of us the words have no significance. It is true that certain communities have earned for themselves in the course of centuries an unenviable reputation for discourtesy. The Italians say "as rude as a Florentine"; and even the casual tourist (presuming his standard of manners to have been set by Italy) is disposed to echo the reproach. The Roman, with the civilization of the world at his back, is naturally, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... of the Recollets at this time was unenviable. The agents of the merchants were not better disposed towards them than the interpreters. Some of these agents were demoralized, and the reproach that they received from the fathers caused them to avoid their presence. ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... rival bookseller to, Gaine in seventeen hundred and sixty was James Rivington. Mr. Hildeburn has given Rivington a rather unenviable reputation; still, as he occasionally printed (?) a child's book, Mr. Hildeburn's remarks ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... very guilty agency, too. Inspector, I am but a child in your estimation, and I feel my position in this matter much more keenly than you do, but I would not be true to the man whom I have unwittingly helped to place in his present unenviable position if I did not tell you that, in my judgment, this cry was a spurious one, employed by the gentleman himself as an excuse for dropping ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... historiographer-royal in 1702. He wrote the bulk of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel with a wonderfully close imitation of Dryden's manner, besides several dramatic pieces and poems. Between Tate, Shadwell, Eusden, and Pye lies the unenviable distinction of being the worst of the laureates of England. Brady was a clergyman who, after the pleasant fashion of that day, was a pluralist on a small scale, for he had the living of Richmond for thirty years from 1696, and while holding ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Narenta, the principal river of Dalmatia and Herzegovina, by one of the numerous mouths which combine to form its delta. Its ancient name was the 'Naro,' and it is also called by Constantine Porphyrogenitus 'Orontium.' Later it acquired an unenviable notoriety, as being the haunt of the 'Narentine Pirates,' who issued thence to make forays upon the coast, and plundered or levied tribute on the trading vessels of the Adriatic. At one time they ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... horrify us is that we are so accustomed to it, and not this or that isolated crime. What are the causes of our indifference, our lukewarm attitude to such deeds, to such signs of the times, ominous of an unenviable future? Is it our cynicism, is it the premature exhaustion of intellect and imagination in a society that is sinking into decay, in spite of its youth? Is it that our moral principles are shattered to their foundations, or is it, perhaps, a complete lack of such principles ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... neglect to reform. The President received them civilly, as he often does when he has a strong hand to play: it is generally when his cards are poor that he gives way to the paroxysms of rage and indulges in the personal abuse and violent behaviour which have earned for him so unenviable a reputation. He listened to all that had been advanced by the deputation, and then said that 'it was no time to talk when danger was at hand. That was the time for action.' The deputation represented to him that there was no danger at hand ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... for the literary album of a gentleman who entertained a fitting admiration of his genius. It was the last request we were to make, and the last kindness we were to receive. He wrote in Mr. ——'s volume, and wrote of Coleridge. This, we believe, was the last production of his pen. A strange and not unenviable chance, which saw him at the end of his literary pilgrimage, as he had been at the beginning,—in that immortal company. We are indebted, with the reader, to the kindness of our friend for permission to print the whole of what was written. It would be impertinence to offer ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... the edges, where the fibre of the wood, of course, is weakest, and presents a succession of bald-pated surfaces, extremely slippery, and incapable of being permanently grooved. A specimen of this will be often referred to in the course of this account, being that which has attained such an unenviable degree of notoriety in the Poultry. Other inventors have shown ingenuity and perseverance; but the great representative of wooden paving we take to be the Metropolitan Company, and we proceed to a narrative of the attacks it has sustained, and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the hotel habitue to become too easy-going. There is doubtless a limit to the virtue of allowing ourselves to be imposed upon, but there is little fear that the individual who opens the question will err in this direction. It behooves him rather to consider the danger of his occupying the unenviable position ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... himself in a trap. He certainly acted like a bird out of its senses, while the gull, flapping hugely, and forgetting, in the excitement, his own bondage, gradually forced the raven's head back and back over his back, till that raven was in the unenviable position of staring over his own back at his own tail, upon which he was ignominiously sitting. Also, his neck was half-dislocated, and he was nearly choking. And about this time it began to dawn upon him that it did not pay in the wild to monkey with great black-backed gulls, even ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... of the crown at this time were men whose names have justly acquired an unenviable notoriety. We must take heed, however, that we do not load their memory with infamy which of right belongs to their master. For the treaty of Dover the King himself is chiefly answerable. He held conferences ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he was in this unenviable frame of mind that he went to see Alice. Not that he had planned definitely to speak to her of his discovery, nor yet that he had planned not to. He had, indeed, planned nothing. For a man usually so decided as to purpose and energetic as to action, he was in a most ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... up as the Irish Madame de Stael by her admirers, and run down as a monster of impudence and iniquity by her enemies, it is no wonder that her character, by no means innately refined, became hardened, if not coarsened, by so unenviable a notoriety. Still, to her credit be it remembered that she never lost a friend, and that she converted more than one impersonal enmity (as in the case of Jeffrey and Lockhart) into a personal friendship. In spite ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... the most abandoned, as his eldest brother, George III., of "revered memory," in spite of his intrigue with the fair Quakeress, was the least vicious. Each brother had his amours—many of them highly discreditable; but for unrestrained and indiscriminate profligacy Henry Frederick took the unenviable palm. ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... For a time he followed his wife's movements, as chronicled in Paris society papers. He learnt that a daughter had been born to him. Finally a tragi-comic story was reported with acclamation in all the papers; his wife played an unenviable part in it. Barbara Paulovna had become a notoriety. He ceased to follow her movements. Scepticism, half formed already by the experiences of his life and by his education, took complete possession of his heart, and he became indifferent ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... woman again had acquired an unenviable fame by some petty act of larceny which the magistrates had been bound to punish, and was explaining in tears on her doorstep to some lady's sympathetic ears that she had done the unfortunate deed merely because she was ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... two all will be changed; the people owning summer homes will themselves own and use automobiles; the horses will see so many that little notice will be taken, but the pioneers of the sport will have an unenviable time. ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... at the Marshalsea. Little Charles was placed under the roof—it cannot be called under the care—of a "reduced old lady," dwelling in Camden Town, who must have been a clever and prophetic old lady if she anticipated that her diminutive lodger would one day give her a kind of indirect unenviable immortality by making her figure, under the name of "Mrs. Pipchin," in "Dombey and Son." Here the boy seems to have been left almost entirely to his own devices. He spent his Sundays in the prison, and, to the best of his recollection, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... this disaster? It is a curiosity which can be easily gratified. The Democratic party was killed in cold blood by Southern traitors. There never was a more causeless, malicious, or malignant murder. The fool in the fable who gained an unenviable notoriety by killing the goose which laid golden eggs, Balaam, who, but for angelic interposition, would have slain his faithful ass, were praiseworthy in comparison. Well might any one of the Northern victims of this cruel outrage have exclaimed, in the language of Balaam's long-eared servant, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... in, and the secretary had disappeared, Miss Baxter saw at once that she was in an unenviable situation, for it was quite evident the three men were scarcely on speaking terms with each other. Nothing causes such a state of tension in a newspaper office as the missing of a piece of news ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... of a bear, the raccoon, comes out of his den in the ledges, and leaves his sharp digitigrade track upon the snow,—traveling not unfrequently in pairs,—a lean, hungry couple, bent on pillage and plunder. They have an unenviable time of it,—feasting in the summer and fall, hibernating in winter, and starving in spring. In April I have found the young of the previous year creeping about the fields, so reduced by starvation as to be quite helpless, and offering no resistance to my taking ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... about four years on her travels, and during those four years, I must confess, I had played a rather strange and unenviable part in regard to her. When in earlier days she had told me she was going on the stage, and then wrote to me of her love; when she was periodically overcome by extravagance, and I continually had to send her first one and then two thousand roubles; ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... W., or the so-called "Industrial Workers of the World," whose policy may be summed up in the words, "I Want to Wreck," and who in derision are termed the "I Won't Works," the "Imported Weary Willies" and the "Wobblies," enjoy the unenviable reputation of being classed among the most insurrectionary, impious and infamous workers of the world to-day. This industrial union, also known as the One Big Union, is the bitter rival of the American Federation of Labor. Joseph ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... savage, it is true, but he was possessed of a dauntless courage, a persistency of purpose, and an unscrupulous craftiness and ambitiousness of character which would have won him distinction of a certain unenviable kind in any community. Already his brain was teeming with vague unformed plots of the wildest and most audaciously extravagant description, the possibility of which he was determined to ascertain ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... cruelty to his victims seems overwhelming. "In France," says Dr. George Wilson, "some of the most eminent physiologists have gained an unenviable notoriety as PITILESS TORTURERS, ... experimenters who would not take the trouble to put out of pain the wretched dogs on which they experimented, even after they had served their purpose, but left them to perish ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... people, in their haste, are making an unenviable history at which they will blush in the years ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... married life a sway over her lord and master all the greater that neither of them was conscious of the fact. A most devoted and submissive wife, a most indulgent and affectionate mother, Mrs. Wedmore occupied the not unenviable position of being half slave, half ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... Standard Oil Company, however, was not due solely to the alliance with the railroads, although this advantage came at a strategic time when it was fighting for supremacy. Its marketing department gave it an unenviable reputation, but achieved amazing success. The department was organized to cover the country, find out everything possible about competitors, and then kill them off by price-cutting or other means. The great resources of the Company enabled it to ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... which has often been called the "Culloden Massacre," caused the whole civilized world to stand aghast. The order of the Duke of Cumberland to grant no quarter to prisoners placed him foremost in the ranks of "British beasts" that have disgraced the pages of history, and earned for him the unenviable title of "The Butcher of Culloden." It has been suggested in extenuation of his fiendish conduct that His Grace was "deep in his cups" the night before the battle, and that the General to whom the order was given, realizing ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... with the heart of the Highlands, will have need of some endurance still, and must care nothing about the condition of earth or sky. Formerly, it was not possible to survey more than a district or division in a single season, except to those unenviable persons who had no other pursuit but that of amusement, and waged a weary war with time. The industrious dwellers in cities, who sought those solitudes, for a while to relieve their hearts from worldly anxieties, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... brethren. Even a slight deviation from the physical type of common manhood and womanhood, as for instance, the possession of a sixth toe or finger, would in the eyes of the multitude go far toward making a man morally objectionable. It was, perhaps, because I wished to save my friend Storm from this unenviable lot that I always contended that he was yet a promising ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the difficulties which beset the new Prime Minister brings home a sense of his unenviable position. Ireland was on the verge of starvation and revolt; everywhere in Europe the rebellions which culminated in 1848 were beginning to stir, seeming then more formidable than they really were in their immediate consequences; in England the Chartist movement was thought to threaten Crown and ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... to her own house and desert her companion, though she could not bring herself to enter again that fear-inspiring place. So she lingered about outside in a state of unenviable desperation till Phyllis once more ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... town on the Euxine, near the mouth of the Danube, where he died, A.D. 18. Niebuhr places him after Catullus the most poetical among the Roman poets, and ranks him first for facility. He did not direct his genius by a sound judgment, and has the unenviable fame of having been the first to depart from the canons of correct Greek taste.] the inimitable felicity and taste of Horace, the gentleness and high spirit of Virgil, and the vehement declamation of Juvenal, but, had the verses of Lucretius perished, we should never have ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Varvara Pavlovna had asked for the first quarter's allowance. Then worse and worse rumors began to reach him; at last, a tragic-comic story was reported with acclamations in all the papers. His wife played an unenviable part in it. It was the finishing stroke; Varvara Pavlovna ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... de Breze, Princess de (wife of the Great Conde), married at thirteen to the Duke d'Enghien, who yielded only to compulsion, 80; the unenviable light in which she was held by her husband and relatives, 80; a fair estimate of her qualities, 81; her fidelity to her husband during adversity, 81; her zeal during the Woman's War, 81; her truly deplorable existence from earliest childhood, ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... he had entirely reformed. But no sooner was he raised a step, than committing some fresh peccadillo, he was compelled to desert in order to avoid punishment. He came thence to Paris, where his exploits as swindler and pickpocket procured him the unenviable distinction of being pointed out to the police as one of the most skilful in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... amusement. Very often the proprietor of the house is simply victimized by such people, and several respectable houses have been so far overrun by them that decent persons have avoided them altogether. One or two of the smaller hotels of the city bear a most unenviable reputation of this kind. Even the first-class hotels cannot keep themselves entirely free from the presence of courtezans of the better class. Rich men keep their mistresses at them in elegant style, and the guests, and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... the leg possessed an unenviable degree of importance. First, on account of the very severe injuries to the soft parts that often accompanied them, without an apparently correspondingly serious damage to the bone. Secondly, on account of the frequency with which ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... an English navigator and admiral, born at Plymouth; was rear-admiral of the fleet sent against the Armada and contributed to its defeat; has the unenviable distinction of having been the first Englishman to traffic in slaves, which he carried off from Africa and imported into the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... its death-rate. It is only within the last two or three years that they have taken to publish the comparative returns of the capital cities of Europe, and now it appears that Buda-Pest is in the unenviable position of having on an average the highest death-rate of any European town! By some this is attributed to the great excess of infant mortality—consolatory for the grown-up people, as reducing their risk; but the children, who die like flies before they are ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... offers no more interesting case between poet and critic than that of John Keats. The imputed influence of a savage critique in hastening the death of the poet has given the Quarterly Review an unenviable notoriety which clings in spite of the efforts of scholars to establish the truth. To many students, Keats, Endymion, and Quarterly are practically connotative terms; and this is a direct result of the righteous but misguided indignation ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... ways, filled with prejudice from the false reports they had heard, came from the east to govern the colonists in the desert. Of the federal appointees thus forced upon the people of Utah, many made for themselves most unenviable records. ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... but the death-penalty has never been hastily inflicted in Portsmouth. The first execution that ever took place there was that of Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenny, for the murder of an infant in 1739. The sheriff was Thomas Packer, the same official who, twenty-nine years later, won unenviable notoriety at the hanging of Ruth Blay. The circumstances are set forth by the late Albert Laighton in a spirited ballad, which is too long to quote in full. The following stanzas, however, give the ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and costing his father a pretty sum to keep him from serious consequences. Before he was fifteen he spent his Saturdays carousing with the wildest set in the town, and incidentally built up a very unenviable reputation. Then he was sent to a city college. Did you hear the rumors that came back ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... man who figures in history, is only known in connection with some stupendous fault—some mistake, some folly, or some sin—that has given him an unenviable immortality. Mention his name, and the huge blot by which his memory is besmirched starts up before the mind in all its hideousness. Take Cain, for example. He occupies the foremost rank as regards fame; ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... while he follows the squirrels and weasels and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and unmusical beyond the worst that one would imagine fit to be called verse. He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of metric movement and associated sounds. This is clearly the result of indifference; an indifference, however, which grows very strange to us when we find that he can write a lovely verse ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... New England were gradually extended to the other colonies, but not without calling forth some opposition in some of them, especially where there was opposition to the use of the Bible. This fact has been rendered quite memorable, by the rather unenviable remark of Governor Berkeley of Virginia in 1670, to the effect, "I thank God, there are no free ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... many weeks of pleasant comradeship, Cuthbert found himself in the unenviable position of standing rival to his friend in the affections of Cherry, and the more he thought about it the less he liked the situation. He could not give Cherry up—that was out of the question; besides, had he renounced her twenty times over, that would not improve Jacob's case one whit. ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... will." She seemed to have taken a desperate step. Miss Jane Marston, Della's sister-in-law, had always been the superfluous member of her family. Such unenviable tasks as amusing or teaching the younger children, sewing, or making up whist sets, had, as is usual with the odd members in a family, fallen to her share. All this Miss Marston hated in a slow, rebellious manner. From always having just too little money to ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... Their raking cross fire kept the English at a distance, and the father could neither drive nor coax his men to the sticking point of courage to scale palisades in such an unnatural war. Claude de La Tour was now in an unenviable plight. He dare not go back to France a traitor. He could not go back to England, having failed to win the day. The son built him a dwelling outside the fort; and there this famous courtier of two great nations, with his noble wife, retired ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... the military, rule; and, if the Roman commonwealth has presented all the different political functions and organizations more purely and normally than any other in ancient or modern times, it has also exhibited political disorganization-anarchy— with an unenviable clearness. It is a strange coincidence that in the same years, in which Caesar was creating beyond the Alps a workto last for ever, there was enacted in Rome one of the most extravagant political farces that ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Church street, and so crabbed in appearance that you might, without endangering your reputation, have sworn it had incorporated in its framework a portion of that chronic disease for which the State has gained for itself an unenviable reputation. Jutting out of the black, moss-vegetating roof, is an old-maidish looking window, with a dowdy white curtain spitefully tucked up at the side. The mischievous young negroes have pecked half the bricks out of the foundation, and with them made curious grottoes on the ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... and who loved his master with unbounded affection, followed." * Compared with that of a modern judge always confronted with a docket of eight or nine hundred cases in arrears, Justice Cushing's lot was perhaps not so unenviable. ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... in that case I suppose I'd better go with you," said Mr. Portlethorpe. "Of course, it's no use going to the bank—they'll be closed; but we can, as you say, go privately to the manager. And we shall be placed in a very unenviable position if Sir Gilbert Carstairs turns up with a perfectly good explanation of all ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... favour, or in what precise capacity I was travelling beside him. Once, and once only, the thought of treachery occurred to me. Is he about to hand me over to the gens-d'armes? and are we now only retracing our steps towards Nancy? If so, Monsieur le Courier, whatever be my fate, your's is certainly an unenviable one. My reflections on this head were soon broken in upon, for my companion again returned to the subject of his "singular error," and assured me that he was as near as possible leaving me behind, under the mistaken impression of my being ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... justice had been served by Butler's acquittal. But in the light of after events, it is perhaps unfortunate that the jury did not stretch a point and so save the life of Mr. Munday of Toowong. Butler underwent his term of imprisonment in Littleton Jail. There his reputation was most unenviable. He is described by a fellow prisoner as ill-tempered, malicious, destructive, but cowardly and treacherous. He seems to have done little or no work; he looked after the choir and the library, but was not above breaking ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... Grilston that afternoon, in order to send up some deeds of a distinguished client to London, for the purpose of immediately effecting a mortgage, set off in a post-chaise, at top-speed, in a very unenviable frame of mind; and by seven o'clock was seated in his office at Grilston, busily turning over a great number of deeds and papers, in a large tin case, with the words "Right Honorable the Earl of Yelverton" painted on the outside. Having turned over almost everything ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... as loud as though he were a good mile away, is a peculiarity of the Persians that has often irritated travellers to the pitch of wishing they had a hot potato and the dexterity to throw it down their throats; and in my present unenviable condition, and its accompanying unenviable frame of mind, I don't mind admitting that I mentally relegated this vociferous melon-vender to a place where infinitely worse than hot potatoes would overtake ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... bile of Swift, it is terrible to think what a repertory of biting sarcasms and envenomed repartees he might have transmitted for the study and imitation of cynics and sneerers. Bitterer enemies no man ever had to contend against; and unenviable indeed must have been their disappointment at finding themselves wholly impotent to discompose his sage and large-hearted serenity. So impressive, withal, is his spirit of toleration and benevolence that a diligent reader of his pages is, as it were, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... and the interview ended. Public feeling among the drummer-boys rose to fever pitch and the lives of Jakin and Lew became unenviable. Not only had they been permitted to enlist two years before the regulation boy's age—fourteen—but, by virtue, it seemed, of their extreme youth, they were allowed to go to the Front—which thing had not happened to acting-drummers ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... no rhyme for it. I thought about it all the time I was dressing—it's dreadfully bad for one to think whilst one's dressing—and all lunch-time, and I'm still hung up over it. I feel like those unfortunate automobilists who achieve an unenviable motoriety by coming to a hopeless stop with their cars in the most crowded thoroughfares. I'm afraid I shall have to drop the aasvogel, and it did give such lovely local colour ...
— Reginald • Saki
... the Acadians on the St. John at this time was a very unenviable one. Fort Boishebert, at the Nerepis, was a frail defence, and they were beginning to be straitened for supplies on account of the vigilance of the English cruisers. Father Germain wrote to the commandant at Annapolis Royal for leave to buy provisions there for the ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... before him countless new dangers. If this were love, then he must face day after day of this sort of thing. Then he would be at the mercy of a passion that must inevitably lead him either to Hamilton's plight or to Chic Warren's equally unenviable position. Each man, in his own way, paid the cost: Hamilton, mad at Maxim's; Chic pacing the floor, with beaded brow, at night. With these two examples before him, surely he should have learned his lesson. Against them he could place his own ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... annoyed. The scandal, which spread throughout the kingdom, placed him in a very unenviable position. The marquis would probably have passed the rest of his life in one of the oubliettes of the Bastile had he not escaped from France. Madame de Montespan, in her wonderfully frank Memoirs, records ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... matters could not be much worse than they were at present. As the new commissioners had merely to take a message and were credited with no discretionary power, it was thought unnecessary to burden the higher magnates of the State with the unenviable task, or to expose them to the undignified predicament of finding their representations flouted by a rebel who might have eventually to be recognised as a king. A chance was given to younger members ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... an unenviable situation. A powerful German squadron, flushed with victory, was probably making for the Islands. The colony was almost defenceless. All the opposition that the enemy would meet would be from a few hundred volunteers. A wireless message that came through emphasized the imminence of the danger. Warnings ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... but very unenviable men. My Lord, my Lord, don't corrupt the pupil you bring to me." Harley smiled, and took his departure, and left Genius at ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and not inconvenient; our landlord is an hosier. I am sure I have a thousand reasons to rejoice that I am so little known: for my present situation is, in every respect, very unenviable; and I would not, for the world, be seen by any acquaintance of ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... occasion, at a cafe, he had cut a bullying hussar's head clean off with his own sabre for knocking a woman down; and in another duel, where he had detected a French count cheating him at cards, he shot his nose off for a bet. With this unenviable reputation, and at the urgent solicitations of his agent, after years of absence he returned to his ancestral home. We met as of old—it was Paul and Henry—and though still the same restive, hot-headed spirit as he had ever been, he yet always listened patiently to what I said, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... ever-growing number of itinerant exhorters. The Spanish alliance was disastrous to English fortunes abroad and distasteful to all patriotic Englishmen at home. And finally, the violent means which the queen took to stamp out heresy gave her the unenviable surname of "Bloody" and reacted in the end in behalf of the views for which the victims sacrificed their lives. During her reign nearly three hundred reformers perished, many of them, including Archbishop Cranmer, by fire. The work of the queen was in vain. No heir was born to Philip and ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... February 5, 1841. Judge Smith is put in an unenviable light by contemporary historians. There seems to be no reason to doubt that he misinformed Douglas and others. See Davidson and Stuve, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... power under Ivan III., who married the daughter of the Greek Emperor, and succeeded in expelling the Tartars, and making himself master of their city Kazan. He was followed by his son Vasilii, who was succeeded by Ivan IV., who has gained a very unenviable reputation on account of his cruelties. Already the yoke of the Tartars had begun to have a very deteriorating effect upon the Russian character, and the more sanguinary code of the Asiatics had effaced the tradition of the laws of Yaroslav. Mutilation, flagellation, and the abundant use of ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... blushing and looking down, wondering how on earth he was to endure this stark publicity. He was there poised bleakly for all to see, an unenviable position. And there was no escape. He must stand there, because it was his job, and recover from the nervousness that had come from finding himself so abruptly thrust on to this veritable pillar of Stylites in the midst of an interested ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... growled Beamish, who seemed to be in an unenviable frame of mind. "Damned nuisance their coming round. I should like to know what ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... mark their hue and their multitude, it would be found that they are indeed 'evil.' We speak not of the thief, and the murderer, and the adulterer, and such like, whose crimes draw down the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable character it is to take the lead in the paths of sin; but we refer to the men who are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest moralities of life—by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and the interchange of the sweetest reciprocities—and ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... did you go there at all, dear?" the girl asked. "You surely knew the unenviable reputation borne ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... a hundred would come nearer to the mark. I have sometimes thought I might consider it worth while to set up a school for instruction in the art. "Poetry taught in twelve lessons." Congenital idiocy is no disqualification. Anybody can write "poetry." It is a most unenviable distinction to leave published a thin volume of verse, which nobody wanted, nobody buys, nobody reads, nobody cares for except the author, who cries over its pathos, poor fellow, and revels in its beauties, which he has all to himself. ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... these islands, for such misgovernment produces discontent, and discontent is the best ally of the invader. Alter that by Home Rule, and your cause instantly becomes ours. Give the Irish nation an Irish State to defend, and the task of an invader becomes very unenviable. As for levying war on Great Britain, we have no inclination in that direction. The best thought in Ireland has always preferred civilisation to war, and we have no wealth to waste on expensive stupidities of any kind. In addition ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... course of things we succeeded to this unenviable position of general butt. The Dutch had thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that we could at least contrive to worry along. And we certainly did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... made men mad By their contagion; Conquerors and Kings, Founders of sects and systems, to whom add Sophists, Bards, Statesmen, all unquiet things Which stir too strongly the soul's secret springs,[ib] And are themselves the fools to those they fool; Envied, yet how unenviable! what stings Are theirs! One breast laid open were a school Which would unteach Mankind the lust to shine ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... said to himself, and said truly, that he loved the world, and that he would willingly spend himself in these great endeavours for the amelioration of its laws and the perfection of its judicial proceedings. And then he betook himself to bed in a frame of mind that was not unenviable. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... cheeks swelled with rage, or with—quids of tobacco. A spittoon, constantly used, was placed by the side of each member. They were rebelling against the speaker; and, of all mortals, I never saw one in a more unenviable position than he. All that his little hammer, his tongue, and his hands could do was of no avail. The storm raged. The words "honourable member," "unparliamentary," "order," "chair," and "in-quiry," were bandied about in all directions. One of the "honourable ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... quicker men. When his wife and her relations declared him to be a mere animal, he never contradicted them—and so gained the reputation of a person on whom reprimand was thrown away. Under the protection of this unenviable character, he sometimes said severe things with an air of perfect simplicity. When the furious doctor discovered him in the laboratory, and said, "I'll be the death of you, if you tell any living creature what I am doing!"—Lemuel answered, with a stare of stupid astonishment, "Make your ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... buried among cobwebs in the fosse, stung by cold till he shivered as in a quartan ague, suffering alternately the chagrin of the bungler self-discovered and the apprehension of a looming fate whose nature could only be guessed at, was in a state unenviable, Argyll himself was scarcely less unhappy. It was not only that his Chamberlain's condition grieved him, but that the whole affair put him in a quandary where the good citizen quarrelled in him with another old Highland gentleman whose code of morals was not in strict accord with written statutes. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... were wont to agree in giving Catherine Street an unenviable reputation. Gay is specially outspoken in his description of that thoroughfare and the class by which it used to be haunted. It was in this street, too, that Jessop's once flourished, "the most disreputable night ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... England seems to have enjoyed so unenviable a reputation for some centuries for the folly and stupidity of its inhabitants, that I am induced to send you the following Query (with the reasons on which it is founded) in the hope that some of your readers may be able to help ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... the part which their leaders have taken in healing we may well include the experience of Wesley. As a mere incident in his revival work, John Wesley (1703-1791), the great founder of Methodism, appeared in the rather unenviable role of exorcist. It is to his credit that he was not led away from his primary purpose by this experience, but returned to his preaching without any effort to add healing to his gifts. The account of his encounter with the demons can best be given ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... of the world the United States stands to-day in an unenviable light. It is a false light. Since the days of William Penn and Benjamin Franklin our people have led in much of the march upward from the slough of weltering strife. Many a stumbling block to progress we have removed from the rugged pathway, but for fifteen years ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... that islet and there remained, feeding on the gnats which live in such places. I observed that its tail had grown to an inordinate length—from disuse, very likely; from lack of the usual abrasion against shrubs and stones. An unenviable fate for one of these restless and light-loving creatures, never again to see the sun; to live and die down here, all alone in the dank gloom, chained, as it were, to a few inches of land amid a desolation of black ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Theatre des Varietes in 1831, when, towards the close of the evening the lights were put out, and the ronde infernale was commenced, obscene and disgusting dances were becoming more and more common in Paris, and continued to make progress till February, 1848. They had attained the most unenviable notoriety in 1845, when at the Bal Mabille a dance was introduced called "La Reine Pomare." Then there was the "Cancan Eccentrique," introduced by a personage called "La Princesse de Mogador," a feigned ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... commence hostilities, and, in the event of their success, everything hitherto achieved would be lost. Or again, the destruction on his part of many fellow-creatures and allies was a terrible alternative, which would place the Spartans in an unenviable light with regard to the rest of Hellas, and render the soldiers ill-disposed to the cause in hand. Accordingly he took with him fifteen men, armed with daggers, and marched through the city. Falling in with one of the reed-bearers, a man suffering ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... Julius Caesar, Mahomet, Joan of Arc, Peter the Great, Napoleon, Byron, Swinburne, and Dostoieffsky are but a few among many great names in the world of art, religion and statecraft. Epileptic princes, kings and kinglets who have achieved unenviable notoriety might be named by scores, Wilhelm II being the most notable of ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... self-willed and headstrong. This is obstinacy. But true independence is that sort of self-confidence and resolution which leads one to go forward in what he has to do, with decision and energy, without leaning upon others. Without this, a man will gain to himself that unenviable distinction described by the homely but expressive term shiftless. The following description, from Mrs. S. C. Hall's "Sketches of Irish Character,"* furnishes an admirable illustration of the results of a ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... society should easily feign ignorance of his offence. An Elizabethan distich—familiar to all barristers, but too rudely worded for insertion in this page—informs us that in the sixteenth century Gray's Inn had an unenviable notoriety amongst legal hospices for the shamelessness of its female inmates. But the pungent lines must be regarded as a satire aimed at certain exceptional members, rather than as a vivacious picture of the general tone of morals in the society. Anyhow ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... with half-a-dozen friends in the chess-room at Very's, about eleven o'clock on the night of the twentieth of December, talking over some of the marvelous successes which had been won by Paul Morphy when in Paris, and the unenviable position in which Howard Staunton had placed himself by keeping out of the lists through evident fear of the New-Orleanian, when Adolph Von Berg came behind me and laid ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... he does not beat his wife nor starve his children; but, supposing even he treated them as he should do, and, moreover, entertained his ten-times removed cousins to dinner every Sunday, what is that to me who do not enjoy his unenviable hospitality? Let his cousins speak well of him by all means; but let the rest of the world speak as they find. I protest against the theory that the social virtues should limit themselves to the home circle, and still more, that they should extend to the distant branches ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... of Clay was one of unenviable distinction and power. He could not be elected President, but he could, it was believed, determine which of his rivals should have the coveted office. His own State favored Jackson as a second choice; but Clay ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... Markham was not the man to put back into port as long as he could possibly keep the sea. He had a good deal of the Flying Dutchman spirit about him, without the profanity of that far-famed navigator, which has so justly doomed him to so unenviable ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... eminent of the reformers, was born at Vezelai, in the Nivernois, in 1519, and was originally a Catholic, and intended for the law. At the age of twenty, he gained an unenviable reputation by the composition of Latin poetry which was at once elegant and licentious, and which, some years afterwards, he published under the title of "Juvenile Poems." Though not in orders, he possessed benefices of considerable ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... has won the unenviable but deserving reputation of being the most foul-smelling creature on the face of the globe. He belongs to the weasel tribe, and all these animals are noted for certain odors which they possess, but ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... of language are supposed to originate in that unclassic section, while the truth is that the laws of polite English are as much violated on Fifth Avenue. Of course, the foreign element mincing their "pidgin" English have given the Bowery an unenviable reputation, but there are just as good speakers of the vernacular on the Bowery as elsewhere in the greater city. Yet every inexperienced newspaper reporter thinks that it is incumbent on him to hold the Bowery up to ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... so much "out of joint" that it was no easy matter to find well-to-do citizens willing to undertake an office which had become so unenviable, and many paid fines varying in amount from L400 to L1,000 rather than serve.(945) By paying a fine for not taking upon himself the duties of an alderman a man could generally, upon petition, be relieved ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... thousand by a single earthquake; and as for death in battle—I sometimes am tempted to think, having sat by many death beds, that our old forefathers may have been right, and that death in battle may be a not unenviable method of passing out of this troublesome world. Besides, we have no right to blame those old Teutons, while we are killing every year more of her Majesty's subjects by preventible disease, than ever they killed in their bloodiest battle. Let us think of that, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... terror of the hobble-dehoy girls, to whom (from the demands of my situation) I was obliged to lay myself so open. The other, if less momentous, was more mortifying. In early days—at my mother's knee, as a man may say—I had acquired the unenviable accomplishment (which I have never since been able to lose) of singing "Just before the Battle." I have what the French call a fillet of voice—my best notes scarce audible about a dinner-table, and the upper register rather to be regarded as a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... moment before filled with rage toward Tarzan of the Apes, stood close to the battling pair, his red-rimmed, wicked little eyes glaring at them. What was passing in his savage brain? Did he gloat over the unenviable position of his recent tormentor? Did he long to see Sheeta's great fangs sink into the soft throat of the ape-man? Or did he realize the courageous unselfishness that had prompted Tarzan to rush to the rescue and imperil his life for Teeka's balu—for ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was his name, and he was a second lieutenant in the —th Infantry. After several months of hard service in the Philippines he earned for himself the unenviable sobriquet of "Carabao Bill," because his awkward movements, ox-like strength, and slow but sure gait were so much like the sturdy animal that formed our "cracker line" that that name could not but ...
— Bamboo Tales • Ira L. Reeves
... the first to remain in their position, the second was to proceed with the Krupp round our left wing, while I despatched the third party to hold back the left wing of the British. I had no wish to share General Cronje's unenviable position. ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... family, had settled upon her as the wife for his nephew, Ignacio Borgia. He had been emboldened to this step by the fact that her only protector was her brother, Filippo di Santafior, whom they had sought to coerce. It was her brother, who, seeing himself in a dangerous and unenviable position, had secretly suggested flight to her, urging her to repair to her kinsman Giovanni Sforza at Pesaro. Her flight, however, must have been speedily discovered and the Borgias, who saw in that act a defiance of their supreme authority, ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... last of the statesmen of the middle period of our history whom it was my fortune to meet. As a whole, and as individuals their fortunes were unenviable. They struggled against the order of things. They accomplished nothing, unless it may be said of them, that they kept the ship afloat. Their memories deserve commiseration, possibly gratitude. No effort of theirs could have secured ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... the desires; hence a demand which can only be put forth by an animality striving up to the absolute. Man, therefore, without gaining anything for his humanity by a rational expression of this sort, loses the happy limitation of the animal, over which he now only possesses the unenviable superiority of losing the present for an endeavor after what is remote, yet without seeking in the limitless future anything but ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... reader judge for himself as to what would be the proper treatment for these birds. Taking the family as a whole that which is made up of birds like the Crows, Ravens, Magpies, Jays, Nut-crackers, "Camp-robbers," etc., though some of them have unenviable names and reputations at least, are not at all as bad as we are sometimes requested to believe them ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... think) amends his position:—"If I had said time instead of the public, I should have expressed myself exactly. It is impossible for me to work up any enthusiasm for the service done to literature by criticism as a whole. I have, no doubt, the unenviable advantage over you of having wasted three mortal months in reading all the literary criticism extant of the first quarter of this century. It would be difficult to express my sense of its imbecility, its blundering, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Polavieja, who as Governor of the Philippines has made for himself an unenviable ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 51, October 28, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... respected, notwithstanding the rumour that he was a "stickit minister," that is, one who had failed in the attempt to preach; and when the presbytery dismissed him on the charge of heresy, there had been many tears on the part of his pupils, and much childish defiance of his unenviable successor. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... between Broadway and Center Street. The site is now occupied by the building of the American News Company. The acoustics of the new opera house are said to have been good, but the inconvenience of the location and unenviable character of the neighborhood are indicated quite as much as Signor Palmo's enterprising and considerate nature by his announcement that after the performances a large car would be run uptown as far as Forty-Second Street for the accommodation of his patrons; and also ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... mixture. The rest of us contrived to keep our legs. The ship was running before the wind, and rolling considerably, and the motion, aided by the wine and the act of plucking aside the flag, might have precipitated the captain into his unenviable situation; he thought otherwise. No sooner was he placed upon his feet, and his mouth sufficiently clear from the salt water decoction of hog-wash, than he collared the poor victim of persecution, and spluttered out, "Mutiny—mu—mu—mutiny—sentry. Gentlemen, I call you ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... No wonder they hastened their flight to earth, and having announced the good tidings, lingered over the fields of Bethlehem, singing as they hovered on the wing. To announce bad news is the unenviable office often imposed on ministers of the gospel; and recollecting with what slow, reluctant steps my feet approached the house where I had to break to a mother the tidings of the wreck, and how her sailor boy with all hands had perished; or, in the news of a husband's sudden death, I had ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... out against him which had no foundation in fact. These things alone would have had a tendency to embitter his heart and to make him rail at the so-called justice of the land. But when we add to this the fact that he was of a proud, sensitive nature, that he shrank from the unenviable notoriety to which he had been exposed, and that he writhed under the things that had been said about him, it can be easily seen that his whole nature rose up in revolt. Everything in the gaol aroused his antagonism, ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... an unenviable competition between places situated in the region of Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf as to which can be the hottest. Abadan, the ever-growing oil port, which is in Persia and on the starboard hand as you go up the Shatt-el-Arab, if not actually the winner according ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... of twenty he succeeded to the throne of Macedonia, a perilous and unenviable inheritance: for the neighbouring barbarian tribes chafed at being held in bondage, and longed for the rule of their own native kings; while Philip, although he had conquered Greece by force of arms, yet had not had time to settle its government and accustom it to its new position. He ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... the naming. They could have submitted to close stowage had the dunnage been decent. But instead of swinging in cosy hammocks, they slept in bunks or wretched pigeon-holes, on fragments of sails, unclean rags, blanket-shreds, and the like. Such unenviable accommodations ought hardly to have been disputed with their luckless possessors, who nevertheless were not allowed to occupy in peace their broken-down bunks and scanty bedding. Two races of creatures, time out of mind the curse of old ships in warm latitudes, infested ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... unenviable. He had been brought all the way across France, leaving his wife and family; he had, it seems, been met by no letters from his noble friends, who may well have ceased to expect him, so long was his delay. He was not at ease in his ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... up Davy's wits so much that he ceased before long to occupy that unenviable and lowly position, and astonished his ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... military Government, jealous of their "honour," could protect them from the thrashing they deserve. It is also true that, at international congresses, excursions and banquets, attended by both men and women representatives of all nations, the Germans have gained an unenviable reputation for bad manners because they have pushed themselves into the best places, crowded into the trains ahead of the women, and generally ignored the courtesies due to ladies and gentlemen ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... yet crossed Hazel Run, and Jackson, carefully concealing his troops, remained on the watch for a few days longer. His anxiety, however, to bring his enemy to battle was even greater than usual. Pope had already gained an unenviable notoriety. On taking over command he had issued an extraordinary address. His bombast was only equalled by his want of tact. Not content with extolling the prowess of the Western troops, with whom he had hitherto served, he was bitterly satirical at the expense of McClellan and of McClellan's ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson |
