"Foulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... endurance.... But from the point of view of a decorous tea-party in a cathedral town, the tone—or the standard of manners, or whatever you would like by way of definition of that vague and comforting word—the tone of the average is deplorably low. The hooligan may be kicked for excessive foulness; but the rider of the high horse is brutally dragged down into the mire. The curious part of it all is that, the gutter element being eliminated altogether, the corporate standard of the remaining majority is lower than the standard ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... underworld that her consort, breaking off a tooth of his comb, lighted it as a torch and rushed in. He found her putrefied body, out of which had been born the eight gods of thunder. Horrified at the awful foulness which he found in the underworld, he rushed up and out, pursued by the Ugly-Female-of-Hades. By artifices that bear a wonderful resemblance to those in Teutonic fairy tales, he blocked up the way. His head-dress, thrown at his pursuer, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... distinguished and high with wonder fairness, and he hath foulest feet and rivelled. And he wondereth of the fairness of his feathers, and areareth them up as it were a circle about his head, and then he looketh to his feet, and seeth the foulness of his feet, and like as he were ashamed he letteth his feathers fall suddenly, and all the tail downward, as though he took no heed of the fairness of his feathers. And as one saith, he hath the voice of a fiend, head of a serpent, pace of a thief. ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... opposite point of view, one perceives that the average country labourer can talk with less restraint because he has really less to conceal than many men who look down upon him. He may use coarse words, but his thoughts are wont to be cleanly, so that there is no suspicion of foulness behind his conversation, rank though it sound. A woman consequently may hear what he says, and not be offended by suggestion of something left unsaid. On these terms the jolly tale is a jolly tale, and ends at that. It does not linger to corrupt ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... fighting on the coast, and near a harbour of their ally, and had the benefit of a large number of galleys. The confederates, on the contrary, besides being away from any friendly port, were thinly manned, and had a great deficiency of stores and provisions, while the foulness of their ships was greatly to their prejudice in the day of battle. Notwithstanding this they ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... Paris, the hot pit whence had issued the storm of foulness that blasted the fair kingdom of France after laying low the hallowed heads of a good king and a beautiful queen, in Paris, leaders and led were now chopping each other's heads off, a qui mieux mieux. "Those thinkers, those lofty patriots, hein, beau cousin, for ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... them here. Let us assume that you and I know what sort of human beings cowboys are,—with all their taciturnity, their surface gravity, their keen sense of humor, their courage, their kindness, their freedom, their lawlessness, their foulness of mouth, and their supreme skill in the handling of horses and cattle. I shall try to tell you ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... are bent; From the prophet on to the priest Everyone worketh lies. They would heal the breach of my people 11 As though it were trifling, Saying "It is well, it is well!"— And well it is not! Were they shamed of the foulness they wrought? 12 Nay, shamed not at all, Nor knew their dishonour! So shall they fall with the falling, Reel in the time of their ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... not, except they be of that largeness as they may be turfed, and have living plants and bushes set in them; that the birds may have more scope, and natural nesting, and that no foulness appear in the floor of the aviary. So I have made a platform of a princely garden, partly by precept, partly by drawing, not a model, but some general lines of it; and in this I have spared for no cost. But it is nothing for ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... advances, he will have so many means of commanding the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be enabled to act with such superior propriety and grace, that the luster of his future conduct will entirely cover or efface the foulness of the steps by which he arrived at that elevation. In many governments the candidates for the highest stations are above the law, and if they can attain the object of their ambition, they have no fear of being called to account for the means by which they acquired it. They often endeavor, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... that will swear upon a book never to rest one night where we rest another this twelvemonth until that we find Sir Tristram. And as for me, said Sir Launcelot, I promise you upon this book that an I may meet with him, either with fairness or foulness I shall bring him to this court, or else I shall die therefore. And the names of these ten knights that had undertaken this quest were these following: First was Sir Launcelot, Sir Ector de Maris, Sir Bors ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... teach our babies, and also shame. The child is pure, innocent, natural. One of the first efforts of nursery culture is to smear that white page with our self-made foulness. We labor conscientiously and with patience, to teach our babies shame. We degrade the human body, we befoul the habits of nature, we desecrate life, teaching evil and foolish falsehood to our defenceless little children. The "sex-taboos" of darkest savagery, the decencies and indecencies ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... constituted one of the entrances to the city. Its predecessor had been burnt, in the great fire of 1666, and the new one was at this time less than forty years old, and, though close and badly ventilated, had not yet arrived at the stage of dirt and foulness which afterwards brought about the death of numbers of prisoners confined there, and in 1750 occasioned an outbreak of jail fever, which not only swept away a large proportion of the prisoners, but infected the court of the Old Bailey close to ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... better attested than that swallows passed the winter months in the mud at the bottom of their brooks, clinging together in globular masses. They have apparently been compelled to give up the custom and account of the foulness of the brooks. Sotus Ecobius discovered in Central Asia a whole nation of people who hibernate. By some investigators, the fasting of Lent is supposed to have been originally a modified form of hibernation, to which the Church gave a religious significance; but this view was strenuously ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... philosophic ideas, threaten in unison. "I see," said the bailiff of Mirabeau,[1422] "that the nobility is demeaning itself and becoming a wreck. It is extended to all those children of bloodsuckers, the vagabonds of finance, introduced by La Pompadour, herself the spring of this foulness. One portion of it demeans itself in its servility to the court; the other portion is amalgamated with that quill-driving rabble who are converting the blood of the king's subjects into ink; another perishes stifled beneath vile robes, the ignoble atoms of cabinet-dust which an office drags ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with some act of intolerance or cruelty, with futile disputes about grace and the Five Propositions, the naturalism which Shaftesbury taught in prose and Pope versified was like the dawn after the foulness of night. Those who wished to soften the inhuman rigour of the criminal procedure of the time[39] used to appeal from customary ordinances and written laws to the law natural. The law natural was announced ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... climbed the long staircase hastily, abusing its darkness and foulness, and planning as I went how my mother might most easily and quickly be moved to a better lodging. Gaining the top of the last flight, I saw that mademoiselle's door on the left of the landing was open, and concluding from ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... that afternoon. The grave was dug among some cocoanut palms out beyond the fetid swamp which lay in those days a crescent of foulness on three sides of the town. A wall separated the swamp from the houses, and over this wall the sewage used to be cast. Poles, bearing human heads, stuck out here and there. The swamp was crossed ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... miserable house in a miserable street. It was, I verily believe, one of the most wretched quarters I have ever seen,—houses that must have been sordid and hideous enough when new, that had gathered foulness with every year, and now seemed to lean and totter to their fall. 'I live up there,' said Black, pointing to the tiles, 'not in the front,—in the back. I am very quiet there. I won't ask you to come in now, but perhaps some ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... not," said I. "I can forgive an insult, even if I am Welsh and a Wynne; but oh, Aunt Gainor, those added weeks of misery, foulness, filth, and pain I owe to this man! I will kill him as I would kill any other vermin." Then I was ashamed, for to say such things before women ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... filthy-mouthed ragamuffins of the seashore, struck an air of stern and serious modesty, and recounted in words of disconcerting directness, but with a rippling sweetness of tone that seemed to wipe the foulness of such language from her cheery lips, the story of a shopmate of hers at home with a broken arm, after a beating from her husband, who had caught her in flagrant wrong-doing with a friend of his! "I wouldn't call her ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... more fortunate families take into their houses those to whom Providence has been less bountiful. You whose daily business takes you to the hovels of the poor, know how wretched and filthy they are, how even the healthy can scarcely bear the foulness of their atmosphere. How great must be the power of such pest-holes to extend the plague when once it finds a foothold there! Let us tear down those hovels. There are enough rich men among you to build new and better houses. You have heard that ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... 'Where is the prince?' asked she; and the Persian replied, 'He is in the city, with his father, and will presently come for thee in great state.' 'O fellow,' said she, 'could he find none to send to me but thee?' At this he laughed and answered, 'O my lady, let not the ugliness of my face and the foulness of my favour deceive thee. Hadst thou profited of me as hath the prince, thou wouldst praise my affair. Indeed, he chose me as his messenger to thee, because of my uncomeliness and forbidding aspect, in his jealousy and love of thee: else hath he slaves and pages and servants, white and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... blood requires cleansing and attenuating, this tea will be of considerable service to the healthy as well as the diseased. By these means the constitution will be preserved and restored from all those chronic and acute afflictions, which are the consequences of acrimonious humours and foulness ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... a century and a third ago; a straggling, unkempt Indian village then, but at least the banks were lovely, and the rolling distances clothed with majestic trees. To-day, these creek banks, connected with numerous iron bridges, are the dumping-ground for cinders, slag, rubbish of every degree of foulness; the bare hillsides are crowded with the ugly dwellings of iron-workers; the ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... I, "you have learned conceits from the catch-books. You quarrel by rote. Were I as eager to answer me, I might say: 'Ah, false flower, you grow out of the foulness underneath. You give your fragrance to all without discretion—a common lover, prodigal of favors, fit only to be torn to shreds by pretty, spiteful fingers, and to die at last with a lie in your mouth. Again ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... came gushing down to freshen the foulness within, and as the Ark rode dryly over the seas, I went below and brought up Nais to gain refreshment from the curing rays of our Lord the Sun. Duly the pair of us adored Him, and gave thanks for His great mercy in coming to light another day, and ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... hate, or grosser heats, their foulness mask Under the vizor of a borrow'd name; Let things eschew the light deserving blame: No cause hast thou to blush for thy sweet task. "Marcian Colonna" is a dainty book; And thy "Sicilian Tale" may boldly pass; Thy "Dream" 'bove ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation's first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... friendly face, not a kind look nor an understanding eye! Crime, passion, foulness, insanity. The sheer horror of her situation mercifully blotted out consciousness. She sank, a ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... be necessary under certain circumstances. They may be necessary for cellars that are founded in swamps, in salt marshes below the level of the sea, and in old river-beds, where the original iniquity of the standing water is made still more iniquitous by the inevitable foulness of the washing from streets and the unclean refuse from sinks and back doors. But for buildings that have four independent walls, with room enough for a man to ride around his own house in a wheelbarrow without trespassing on ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... its backslidings: and the best that he could report of the Hurons, after all the toils and all the blood lavished in their conversion, was, that they "still retain a little Christianity;" while the Ottawas are "far removed from the kingdom of God, and addicted beyond all other tribes to foulness, incantations, and sacrifices to evil spirits." [Footnote: Lettre du Pere Jacques Marquette au R. P. Superieur des Missions; ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... stall-fed butchers' meat. It were sufficient to disgust the stoutest stomach to see the foul, gross, and nasty manner in which, and the fetid, putrid, and unwholesome materials with which they are fed. Perpetual foulness and cramming, gross food and nastiness, we know, will putrefy the juices, and corrupt the muscular substance of human creatures—and sure they can do no less in brute animals—and thus make our food poison. The ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... plan, because while the architect deals with dead stone and timber, the statesman and Socialist deal with living and striving things. But he seeks to make a plan as one designs and lays out a garden, so that sweet and seemly things may grow, wide and beautiful vistas open and weeds and foulness disappear. Always a garden plan develops and renews itself and discovers new possibilities, but what makes all its graciousness and beauty possible is the scheme and the persistent intention, the watching and the waiting, the digging and burning, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... knock a man over; all the old smells of a generation would be drawn out by this heat—for there was never any washing of the walls and rafters and pillars, and they were caked with the filth of a lifetime. The men who worked on the killing beds would come to reek with foulness, so that you could smell one of them fifty feet away; there was simply no such thing as keeping decent, the most careful man gave it up in the end, and wallowed in uncleanness. There was not even a place where a man could wash his hands, and the men ate as much ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... reason that men are unwilling for women to enter upon public or business life is, not so much the fear of competition, or the dread lest women should lose their gentleness, and thus deprive society of this peculiar charm, as the fact that they are ashamed of the foulness of life which exists outside of the house and home. The good man knows that it is difficult to purify it: the bad man does not wish to be disturbed in his prey upon society. If I could but give to all women the tenth part of my experience, they would see that this is true; and would see, besides, ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... smiles and good-nature; and the children are frank, lively, laughing urchins. The old women are thorough hags. Indolence, when left to themselves, is their besetting sin; they detest any fixed employment, and their foulness of person and garments renders them disagreeable inmates: in this rainy climate they are supportable out of doors. Though fond of bathing when they come to a stream in hot weather, and expert, even admirable swimmers, these people never take to the water for the purpose of ablution. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... was incomprehensibly misprinted in the first issue of the Society's Report, where it appeared as "foulness." To prevent misapprehension, the whole staff of ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in which I most gloried. And now it is my desire that you should know the stories of these two happenings, understanding them more truly from learning the very facts than from hearing what is spoken of them, and in the order in which they came about. Because I had ever held in abhorrence the foulness of prostitutes, because I had diligently kept myself from all excesses and from association with the women of noble birth who attended the school, because I knew so little of the common talk of ordinary people, perverse and subtly flattering chance gave birth to an ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... Tribune, sternly; "thy lips elude the answer I would seek. In our degenerate time and land, thy sex and ours forget too basely what foulness writes a leprosy in the smallest stain upon a matron's honour. That thy heart would never wrong me, I believe; but if thy weakness, thy fear of my death should wrong me, thou art a bitterer foe to Rienzi than the swords of the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... became filled with an overwhelming curiosity, the eager evil curiosity of the schoolboy, the perverse craving for the knowledge of vice. He listened with all his ears to everything that was said and went about through the great city with eyes open only to its foulness. He even looked up in the dictionary the meanings of the new words, finding in the cold, scientific definitions some ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... was staggered when he entered the room where sat, in the midst of gloom and filth, the man who had been the cause of so much distress to him and his. The atmosphere was oppressive with the concentrated foulness of numberless evil odours. A bed there was in the darkest corner of the room on the floor. It looked as though composed of the refuse raked from a pig-sty, and thrust into a sack which had been used for the conveyance ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... if thou wouldst indeed have thy sins washed away by the blood of Christ, labour first to see them in the glass of the law, and do not be afraid to see thy besmeared condition, but look on every spot thou hast; for he that looks on the foulness of his face by the halves, will wash by the halves; even so, he that looks on his sins by the halves, he will seek for Christ by the halves. Reckon thyself, therefore, I say, the biggest sinner in the world, and be persuaded that there is none worse than thyself; then let ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... beneath the cloak, and again offering him my arm. He leaned upon it heavily. We continued our route in search of the Amontillado. We passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... low-caste carrion-eater. If from the lowest, filthiest, and most poisonous dens in London, you were to take a man, reeking with beer and tobacco, and with his clothes crawling with vermin, and presenting, in short, every appearance of foulness, dirt, and disease; if you were to take that man and place him between two ladies at the administration of the Holy Communion, I do not say that they would there and then refuse the Sacrament on these terms, but I think we may be pretty sure that, from sanitary motives, if from no others, ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... question of temperature is really the most formidable with which the tunnel engineer has to contend. In the St. Gothard Tunnel, just before the meeting of the two headings in February, 1880, the temperature rose as high as 93 deg. Fahr. This, combined with the foulness of the air, produced an immense diminution in the work done per person and per horse employed, while several men were actually killed by the dynamite gases, and others suffered from a disease which was traced to a hitherto unknown species ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various
... turn pale, the eyes loose their brightness and by degrees the white grows as it were greenish, the gums want their due firmness, with their proper colour; and an unpleasing foulness grows upon the teeth: the inside of the mouth is pale and furred, and the throat dry and husky: the colour of the skin is pale (though there are periods when the face is florid) and as the obstruction gathers ground, and more affects the liver, the whole body becomes yellow, tawny, greenish, ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... region abounding with every sort of foulness, Yudhishthira asked the celestial messenger, saying, How far shall we proceed along a path like this? It behoveth thee to tell me where those brothers of mine are. I desire also to know what region is this of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... who possesses the gift of insight, cannot rest. He lived in the midst of inventors. Watt and Boulton were constantly suggesting new things, and Murdock became possessed by the same spirit. In 1791 he took out his first patent. It was for a method of preserving ships' bottoms from foulness by the use of a certain kind of chemical paint. Mr. Murdock's grandson informs us that it was recently re-patented and was the cause of a lawsuit, and that Hislop's patent for revivifying gas-lime would have been an infringement, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... shall come for thee in great state." Said she, "O thou! say me, could he find none handsomer to send to me?"; whereat loud laughed the Sage and said, "Yea verily, he hath not a Mameluke as ugly as I am; but, O my lady, let not the ill-favour of my face and the foulness of my form deceive thee. Hadst thou profited of me as hath the Prince, verily thou wouldst praise my affair. Indeed, he chose me as his messenger to thee, because of my uncomeliness and loathsomeness in his jealous love of thee; else hath he Mamelukes and negro slaves, pages, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... from my limbs: I was shaved, and polled my locks of hair; the foulness was cast to the desert with the garments of the Nemau-sha. I clothed me in fine linen, and anointed myself with the fine oil of Egypt; I laid me on a bed. I gave up the sand to those who lie on it; the oil of wood to him who would anoint himself therewith. There was ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... close and white, cut off the green leaves, and see that there be no caterpillars about the stalk. Soak them an hour in cold water, then boil them in milk and water, and take care to skim the saucepan, that not the least foulness may fall on the flower. The vegetable should be served very white, and not boiled too much.—Cauliflower dressed in white sauce should be half boiled, and cut into handsome pieces. Then lay them in a stewpan with a little broth, a bit of mace, a little salt, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... boils, had Michael Zanche reach'd, When this one left a demon in his stead In his own body, and of one his kin, Who with him treachery wrought. But now put forth Thy hand, and ope mine eyes." I op'd them not. Ill manners were best courtesy to him. Ah Genoese! men perverse in every way, With every foulness stain'd, why from the earth Are ye not cancel'd? Such an one of yours I with Romagna's darkest spirit found, As for his doings even now in soul Is in Cocytus plung'd, and yet doth seem In body ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... you go down into such foulness, then?"—the words broke from his lips irrepressibly. "It was He who put you in the hands of a selfish woman; it was He who gave you a weak will. It is He who suffers marriages as false as yours. Why, child! you call it crime, the vow that bound you for that year to a man you loathed; yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... mind my past foulness, and the carnal corruptions of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me (Thou sweetness ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... caves, lighted only by the door, but deliciously cool, and quite clean; the floors of puddled clay or ants' nests, and very clean. On entering these cool retreats, the flies that had tormented them shirked the cool grot, and buzzed off to the nearest farm to batten on congenial foulness. On the fat, round, glossy babies, not a speck of dirt, whereas the little Boers were cakes thereof. The Kafir would meet them at the door, his clean black face all smiles and welcome. The women and grown girls ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... shut the frail door which separated the two compartments of the cavern, he heard the clang of the scourge and the groans of the penitent under his self-inflicted penance. A cold shudder came over the knight as he reflected what could be the foulness of the sin, what the depth of the remorse, which, apparently, such severe penance could neither cleanse nor assuage. He told his beads devoutly, and flung himself on his rude couch, after a glance at the still sleeping Moslem, and, wearied by the various scenes of the day and the night, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... imagine full busily, the vilite and foulness of sin, and how the LORD GOD is displeased therefore: and of this vilite of hideousness of sin, it behoveth us to busy us in all our wits for to abhor and hold in our mind a great shame of sin, ever! and so then we owe [ought] to sorrow heartily therefore, and ever flying all occasion thereof. ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... the thing lay still; and from the wet, sticky foulness of it I rose and stood shuddering. Elza lay on the ground; but she had risen upon one elbow and I saw that she was unharmed save for the shock of terror through which she had passed—a mitigated shock with the knowledge now that I was ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... prosperity some exceptions to this knightly and chivalric piggishness and penury, it is none the less true that they outbalanced it by sundry and peculiar vices. And yet, bad as life then was, it is impossible for us to guess at, or realize, all its foulness. We know it mostly from poets, and the poet and historian, like the artist, have in every age lived quite out of the actual, and with all the tact of repulsion avoided ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... outrageous personalities. The persons thus placed in the journalistic pillory were merely paid back in their own coin, but they had never been accustomed to yield to others the privileges they claimed for themselves, and could not understand how "this fellow" dared presume to retort the foulness hurled at him. His paper meanwhile enjoyed a fair circulation, and his enemies periodically saw themselves held up before the people of the Province in a light well calculated to bring down public execration ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... favour, for his face was as the face of an ass, his shape that of an ape and his look as the look of a malignant snake: his presence was grievouser than parting from the beloved make; and blacker than night was his blackness and more fetid than the lion was his breath for foulness; more crooked than a bow was his crookedness and grimmer than the leopard was his ugliness, and he was branded with the mark of the Infidels on face.[FN392] After this he came up to King Afridun and kissed his feet and stood ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... eastern or western quarters. It is expedient, however, to cackle or arm the cables with an iron chain, or with good rounding, for five or six fathoms from the anchor, to secure them from being rubbed by the foulness ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... lie a huge, weltering mass of slime, a very quagmire of foulness and miasma, in the depths and darkness of which he could dimly discern the innumerable coils of a deadly dragon, breathing forth poison and death into the air, which those beloved of God and himself must breathe, ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and whose power showed itself in a gradual disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes, and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the Restoration. A yet nobler result of the religious revival was the steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation of the profligate and ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... their knees. Again Rosamund was conscious of feeling soiled, dirty, in the midst of them. As they filed out, she with them, a burning hatred came to her. She hated the woman who was the cause of her feeling dirty. She wanted to use her hands, to tear something away from her body—the dirt, the foulness. For she felt it actually on her body. Her physical purity was desecrated by—she wouldn't think ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... canyon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... first to raise a crop of Indian corn (maize) which, according to the mode of cultivation, is a good preparation for wheat; then a crop of wheat; after which the ground is respited (except for weeds, and every trash that can contribute to its foulness) for about eighteen months; and so on, alternately, without any dressing, till the land is exhausted; when it is turned out, without being sown with grass-seeds, or reeds, or any method taken to restore it; and another ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... and stolid, tow-haired, with the stamp of acquiescent patience in their homely faces, they came on with the swing, but none of the usual spirit, of drilled men. They asked no questions, but went where they were led, and the foulness of the close-packed steerage seemed to cling about them. For a time the depot rang to the rhythmic tramp of feet, and when, at a sign from the interpreter, it stopped, two bewildered children, frowsy and unwashed, in greasy homespun, sat down and gazed at Miss Torrance with mild blue eyes. She ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... to a literary phenomenon that will in time become historical, that phenomenon being the sudden growth, in all parts of Europe, of a fungus-literature bred of Foulness and Decay; and contemporaneously, the intrusion into all parts of human life of a Calvinistic yet materialistic Morality. This literature of a sunless Decadence has spread widely, by virtue of its ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... comparison with which that of Limberger cheese would be mere geranium. I was betrayed. Tyre had sent over a detachment of spies, and the Sidonites were armed. I briskly dodged several companion eggs whose foulness was permitted to adorn the walls of Jones's Hall behind me, and then undertook to escape. Simultaneously with the explosion of the first shot, a howl had burst from the audience, which boded no good for any prospects of comfort and profit I might entertain. Escaping ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fits and starts, passed through me during the first hours of the death struggle; but the worst horror of that awful night came presently. In the recesses of the chamber, furthest from the windows, a harder evil than the heat was the intolerable foulness of the air. Even where I was standing it had become an excruciating pain to breathe, and my breast felt as though laced about with iron bands. In the interior many had by this time dropped down, not ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... still region where the more timid life has nestled undaring, unadventured, shrinking from the struggle and the strife above, recoiling from the seething foulness below—what have we in this dreamland inhabited by woman? And wherefore the earnest turning thitherward, in our day, of so many brave, so many earnest, so many sad, so many yearning, aspiring eyes? Wherefore the restlessness, wherefore the groans of imprisonment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... well." Mr Rounsell stood up and pointed out the positions of Liege and Polpier on the wall-map, and their relative distances from London. A moment later the Vicar frowned again as Mr Boult launched into a violent—and as it turned out, a lengthy—invective against the German Emperor; with the foulness of whose character and designs he had, it seemed, been intimately acquainted for a number of years. "Who made the War?" "Who had been planning it and spying for the opportunity to gratify his unbridled lust of power?" "Who would ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... Foul. Surely this ought to be full. A foul bumbard might be empty. "Foulness" and "shedding his liquor" are not necessarily contingent; but fulness and overflowing are. A full vessel, shaken, cannot choose "but shed ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... hogs-dung or by any other means as some by rags, some by coarse wool, by pitch marks, and tarry stuff, any oyly stuff, salt and many things more, yea indeed any thing almost that hath any liquidness, foulness, saltness or good moysture in it, is very naturall inrichment to almost any sort of land.'' Blith speaks of an instrument which ploughed, sowed and harrowed at the same time; and the setting of corn was then a subject of much discussion. Blith was a zealous advocate of drainage ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... impartiality. If a Christian man has been ever so near God, and then goes away from Him, he is judged notwithstanding his past nearness. And if a poor soul, all crusted over with his sins and leprous with the foulness of long-standing iniquity, comes to God and asks for pardon, he is judged according to his penitence, 'without respect of persons.' That great hand holds an even balance. And though the strictness of the judicial process may have its solemn and its awful aspect, it ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... is one strange, but quite essential, character in us: ever since the Conquest, if not earlier:—a delight in the forms of burlesque which are connected in some degree with the foulness of evil. I think the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible temper, is that of Chaucer; and you will find that, while it is for the most part full of thoughts of beauty, pure and wild like that of an April morning, there are even in the midst ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... tortures to forswear myself. I am as I was when I came to Dover. As the King saw me so he left me. Yet do I maintain and avow it was rather because he feared alliance with my brother's party than for any foulness of my person.' ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... well; the noise from the guard-room without was too great, and when that was quiet there was still the foulness of the place to keep him awake, for all the floor was strewn with rotten rags and straw and bones, as it were a kennel. His wounds, besides, had not been tended, and he was very sick when he awoke, and for a while scarce knew where he was. I think, perhaps, ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson
... night; or some senna tea in the morning. You do very well to live extremely low, for some time; and I could wish, though I do not expect it, that you would take one gentle vomit; for those giddinesses and swimmings in the head always proceed from some foulness of the stomach. However, upon the whole, I am very glad that your old complaint has not mixed itself with this, which I am fully convinced arises simply from your own ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... seventeenth century. Claverhouse, with his powerful character and indomitable will, with his Titanic daring and relentless cruelty, has the face of a singularly beautiful young girl. Judge Jeffreys, whose delight in blood was only equalled by the foulness and extravagance of his profanity, looks in his picture the very type of spiritual wistfulness. Samuel Pepys, whose large oval eyes and clear-cut profile suggest a somewhat voluptuous and very fastidious aristocrat, was really a man of the people, sharp to a miracle in ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... that foulness keep from sight— Fine manners in the most misfeatured wight; Fine shapes of art by servile fingers moulded; Fine wisdom ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... Christophe was struck by the careful simplicity of his dress: and the neatness of it, which at any other time would have been little to his liking, was in that place an agreeable surprise: in such an atmosphere of foulness there was something charming and healthy about it. And at once he felt just as he had done the night before when he gazed into Olivier's clear, honest eyes. He held out his hand: but Olivier was overcome with ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... licentiousness of their manners, a nuisance to society; which they scandalized and disturbed by their riots, their mad frolics, and even by their quarrels. Their heads and waists were bound with ivy, and in their hands they brandished a thirsus, or kind of lance, garnished with vine-leaves. When by any foulness of weather they were driven into their huts, they passed their time in a kind of noisy merriment, of shoutings and dithirambic catches, accompanied by timpanums, by cymbals, by sistrums, and other instruments, in which noise was more consulted ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... this passage Spenser follows closely the description of the witch Alcina in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, vii, 73. Rogero has been fascinated by her false beauty, and her real foulness is exposed by means of a magic ring. The stripping of Duessa symbolizes the proscription of vestments and ritual, and the overthrow of images, etc., at the time of the Reformation. Duessa is only banished to the wilderness, not put to death, and reappears in another book ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... Counties of England. It divides the East Riding of Yorkshire from Lincolnshire, during the whole of its course, and is formed by the junction of the Ouse and the Trent. At Bromfleet, it receives the little river Foulness, and rolling its vast collection of waters eastward, in a stream enlarged to between two and three miles in breadth, washes the town of Hull, where it receives the river of the same name. Opposite to Hedon and ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock
... cleanest morals think it right to keep away from them. The foulest portions of the men go first, stay longest, and stand thickest at the places of voting. How then will it be when the foulest portion of the women get packed into the same crowd, and drive modesty away by the foulness of their speech and presence? When the aggregate filth of both sexes shall have met together at the polling stations, as it will be sure to do, we hardly think any chaste or modest home-loving woman will go near this stench ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... every eye is open, every foot astir, and the busy, waking life of men again begins. The fleecy clouds that hang on the eastern horizon grow ruddy with gold; and the arrowy light shoots its bright rays athwart the clear blue sky. The dust and foulness which the night has hidden stand revealed. But in the forests and hills the pulses of nature beat fresh and full; the leopard and the tiger slink away; the gay flowers open; the birds flit to and fro, and with woodland music welcome the ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... dashed off by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage has its peculiar blight, and may have the healthy life choked out of it by a particular action of the foul land which rears or neighbors it, or by damage brought from foulness afar. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... again and fetch a few breaths to humour my nose to the odour. As in the cabin, however, so here I found this noxiousness of air was not caused by putrefaction or any tainting qualities of a vegetable or animal kind, but by the deadness of the pent-up air itself, as the foulness of bilge-water is owing to its being imprisoned from air in the ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... thoughts of his breast; therefore the Lord, holy in helpfulness, Pro- 1290 tector of all men, told him by revelation what he pur- posed inflicting upon the wicked ones: for he saw the earth full of unrighteousness, the broad plains laden with sin, polluted with foulness. Then spoke the Al- 1295 mighty, our ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... the place a secret, but are undecided whether to suppress it or to permit the publication of the coming volumes. Burton's own footnotes are so voluminous that they exceed the letterpress of the text proper, and make up the bulk of the work.[FN459] The foulness of the second volume of his translation places it at a much higher premium in the market ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... tightly together that it was impossible to move, and thus obtain the relief of even a slight change of position; bear in mind that it was equally impossible to cleanse the slave-deck during the entire period of the passage of the ship from port to port; think of the indescribable foulness of the place, the dreadful atmosphere generated by the ever-accumulating filth, and the exhalations from the bodies of four or five hundred human beings wedged together in this confined space; and add to ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... philanthropist, who had devoted much study to the dwellings of the poor, gave it as his opinion that temperance-societies were a hopeless undertaking in London, unless these dwellings underwent a transformation. They were so squalid, so dark, so comfortless, so constantly pressing upon the senses foulness, pain, and inconvenience, that it was only by being drugged with gin and opium that their miserable inhabitants could find heart to drag on life from day to day. He had himself tried the experiment of reforming a drunkard by taking him from one of these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... of his mission, and on the way reflected upon possible improvements of the public grounds, upon the desirability of fountains, and why people lived where there were neither parks nor fountains, but only mud, lime, and bricks, emitting horrid exhalations and every conceivable foulness. This reminded him of his own walks about the Cyennaza, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... authors he mastered before his twelfth year. Two attacks of the plague, agues, tertian and quotidian, malignant ulcers, hernia, haemorrhoids, varicose veins, palpitation of the heart, gout, indigestion, the itch, and foulness of skin. Relief in the second attack of plague came from a sweat so copious that it soaked the bed and ran in streams down to the floor; and, in a case of continuous fever, from voiding a hundred and twenty ounces of urine. As a boy he was a sleep-walker, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... guiding spirit. Happily so, for his was a spirit fitted to rule, both by power, and tact, and taste. With 'Uncle MARK' in the chair, I knew there would be neither austere autocracy, nor faineant laxity, neither weakness of stroke nor foulness of blow, neither Rosa-Matilda-ish, ...
— Punch, Volume 101, Jubilee Issue, July 18, 1891 • Various
... hour, as well as I could measure time, which passed slowly; for not only were the minutes tedious, but the foulness of the air made them also extremely uncomfortable. Desiree was again lying down, half-unconscious but not asleep, for now and then she spoke drowsily. Harry complained of a dizziness in the head, and my own seemed ready to burst through my temples. The soroche of the mountains ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... thorny circlet, moving warily because to the core it was envenomed. Beneath the sun it swarmed with hideous life; beneath the moon the poison might yet stir. The moon silvered the edge of things, drew illusion like a veil across the haunted ring; below, what hidden foulness!... Did the life there know its hideousness? Those lengths and coils, those twisting locks of Medusa, might think themselves desirable. These pulpy, starkly branching cacti, these shrubs that bred poignards, these fibrous ropes, dark and knotted lianas, binding all together like monstrous exaggerations ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... artificial foods are best fed with a teaspoon, as by this method liability to over-feeding and danger from unclean utensils are likely to be avoided. If a nursing-bottle is used, it should be of clear flint glass so that the slightest foulness may be easily detected, and one simple in construction, which can be completely taken apart for cleaning. Those furnished with conical black rubber caps are the best. Each time after using, such a bottle should have the cap removed, and both bottle ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg |
