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Pestilent

adjective
1.
Exceedingly harmful.  Synonyms: baneful, deadly, pernicious.
2.
Likely to spread and cause an epidemic disease.  Synonyms: pestiferous, pestilential, plaguey.  "Plaguey fevers"






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"Pestilent" Quotes from Famous Books



... carriage out of this pestilent throng, that I may the better hear thee," said the governor. The Escribano entered the carriage, when in a twinkling the door was closed, the coachman smacked his whip, mules, carriage, guards, and all dashed off at a thundering rate, leaving ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... have had a pretty good idea of diphtheria. He speaks of it in connection with other throat manifestations under the heading of "crusty and pestilent ulcers of the tonsils." He divides the anginas generally into four kinds. The first consists of inflammation of the fauces with the classic symptoms, the second presents no inflammation of the mouth nor of the fauces, but is complicated by a sense of suffocation—apparently our croup. The ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... our commiseration, but also because their kindred were pleased with their sufferings; for they forgot the relation they bare to them, and at the sight of this sad accident approved of the judgment given against them; and because they looked upon the people about Dathan as pestilent men, they thought they perished as such, and ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... unconscious, and not one doctor even looked at her; the sick soldiers, whom she had tended as long as she could keep on her legs, in their turn got up from their pestilent litters to lift a few drops of water in the hollow of a broken pot ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev

... and emissaries about the kingdom to arouse, and encourage, and assemble such Saxon forces as were yet to be found. In a word, they would commence a series of measures for recovering the country from the possession of its pestilent enemy, and for restoring the rightful sovereign to the throne. The development of these projects and plans, and the measures for carrying them into effect, were very much hastened by an event which suddenly occurred in the neighborhood of Ethelney, the account of which, however, ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... that the line of road is nearly impassable, and that a long succession of formerly cultivated estates presents now a series of pestilent swamps, overrun with bush, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... she advised me to chastity, so heed what she had heard of me from her husband, as to restrain within the bounds of conjugal affection (if it could not be pared away to the quick) what she felt to be pestilent at present and for the future dangerous. She heeded not this, for she feared lest a wife should prove a clog and hindrance to my hopes. Not those hopes of the world to come, which my mother reposed in Thee; but the ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... to mee, then a foule and pestilent congregation [Sidenote: nothing to me but a] of vapours. What a piece of worke is [Sidenote: what peece] a man! how Noble in Reason? how infinite in faculty? in forme and mouing how expresse and [Sidenote: faculties,] admirable? in Action, how like ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald

... against them on all sides. This outcry was not confined to any one class or party either in the political or religious world. We may not be surprised to find Warburton mildly suggesting that 'he would hunt down that pestilent herd of libertine scribblers with which the island is overrun, as good King Edgar did his wolves,'[186] or Berkeley, that 'if ever man deserved to be denied the common benefits of bread and water, it was the author of a Discourse of Freethinking,'[187] and that 'he should ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... to think that many of our rural clergymen, intent on shielding their congregations from pestilent doctrine and latitudinarism, are actuated by much the same spirit as the Sultan Omar when he set fire to the great Library at Alexandria. The Bible is no doubt the best of books, and it may be that the Confession of Faith comes next: but when these ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... province called PASHAI, the people of which have a peculiar language, and are Idolaters, of a brown complexion. They are great adepts in sorceries and the diabolic arts. The men wear earrings and brooches of gold and silver set with stones and pearls. They are a pestilent people and a crafty; and they live upon flesh and rice. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... the pestilent wit which blights whatever it touches, are not distinctively American. It is because we are a humorous rather than a witty people that we laugh for the most part with, and not at, our fellow creatures. Indeed, judged by the unpleasant things we might say and do not say, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... Sub-Prior; "one important part of thy engagement is forgotten—thou art farther to promise, that while thus left at liberty, thou wilt not preach or teach, directly or indirectly, any of those pestilent heresies by which so many souls have been in this our day won over from the kingdom of light to the kingdom ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... crystal spring; and this threadbare cloak is better than your gay robes. Gold—I value it no higher than pebbles on the beach. What brought me was concern for you; I would not have you ruined by this same pestilent wealth, this temptation for plunderers; many is the man it has sunk in helpless misery. Take my advice, and fling it bodily into the sea; a good man, to whom the wealth of philosophy is revealed, has no need of the other. It does not matter about deep water, my good sir; wade in up to ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... action as in influence. Without bustle, and with unmoved calmness, she would superintend the preparation of food for a thousand men, and assist in feeding them herself. Just so she moved amidst the flying bullets upon the field, bringing succor to the wounded; or through the hospitals amidst the pestilent air of the fever-stricken wards. Self-controlled, she could control others, and order and symmetry sprung up before her as a natural result of the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... not have made the black more resolutely black, (though the whole color of the school of Athens is kept in distinct separation from one black square in it), nor the green more unquestionably green. Yet the whole is pestilent and loathsome. ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... times—which was the highway from the Star-chamber to the tower—which has been belaboured in our days with so much wealth, and sullied with so much impurity; that river, whose current is one hour rich as the stream of a gold river, the next hour, foul as the pestilent churchyard,—was then, especially between Richmond and Teddington, a glassy, placid stream, reflecting on its margin the chestnut-trees of stately Ham, and the reeds and wild flowers which grew undisturbed in the fertile meadows ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton

... ALEXIEVNA,—These unlooked-for blows have shaken me terribly, and these strange calamities have quite broken my spirit. Not content with trying to bring you to a bed of sickness, these lickspittles and pestilent old men are trying to bring me to the same. And I assure you that they are succeeding—I assure you that they are. Yet I would rather die than not help you. If I cannot help you I SHALL die; but, to enable me to help you, you must flee like a bird out of the nest ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... ceased to be an instrument of government, abundance of designing persons have not been wanting in latter ages, who found much interest in taking advantage of the weakness or credulity of their fellow creatures. Against this pestilent and abandoned race of men, most civilized countries have enacted penal laws. But what rendered such persons peculiarly detestable in modern times, was the communication which they were supposed to hold with the devil, to whom they sold themselves, and ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... soon!" I groaned. Here he sets himself to comfort Pluto who lay betwixt us, panting miserably, with lolling tongue or snapping fiercely at these pestilent flies. ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol

... It is supposed that storms, earthquakes, famines and pestilent diseases are here ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana

... rich, a man of great affairs, Steeped to the lips in monetary cares Down at Clazomenae: and some dispute 'Twixt him and King had festered to a suit. Tough, pushing, loud was he, with power of hate To beat e'en King's; so pestilent his prate, That Barrus and Sisenna you would find Left in the running leagues and leagues behind. Well, to return to King: they quickly see They can't agree except to disagree: For 'tis a rule, that wrath is short or long Just as the combatants are weak or strong: 'Twixt Hector ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... great surgeons and graduate nurses, the building of hundreds of houses and the furnishing of them down to the last center table, they will not recall the rebuilding of the entire P. R. R., nor scores of little items like $43,000 a year merely for oil and negroes to pump it on the pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things so essential to the success of the enterprise yet that leave not a trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of the canal is the accomplishment of the United States ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... title sufficiently indicates its import, "The Discovery of Witchcraft, wherein the lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers is notably detected; the knavery of conjurers, the impiety of inchanters, the folly of soothsayers, the impudent falsehood of cozeners, the infidelity of atheists, the pestilent practices of pythonists, the curiosities of figure-casters, the vanity of dreamers, the beggarly art of alcumstrie, the abomination of idolatrie, the horrible art of poisoning, the virtue and power of natural magic, and all the conveniencies of ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... Milton! John Hypocrite and Parricide! A pretty author, and a pretty cause he advocates,—I thank God there are no schools and no printing presses in this colony, nor are like to be,—and a courageous Surveyor-General to keep by him such pestilent stuff in the present year of grace. 'Abuses Stript and Whipt,' 'Anglia Rediva,' 'Diary of Nehemiah Wallington,' 'Bastwick's Litany!' Miles Carrington, Miles Carrington! I have my eye on thee! Thou hadst need to walk warily! 'Zion's ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... details—her dress was grey, and if he could judge aright, fashionably made. Yes, a little French fashion-plate—a doll, powdered, perhaps, and painted, laced up, and perfumed and clothed in dainty raiment, to come and make discord in her father's home! It was intolerable. Why did not Brooke leave this pestilent creature in her own abode, with the insolent, aristocratic friends who had done their best already to ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... Harold's Pilgrimage' must wait till Murray's is finished. He is making a tour in Middlesex, and is to return soon, when high matter may be expected. He wants to have it in quarto, which is a cursed unsaleable size; but it is pestilent long, and one must obey one's bookseller. I trust Murray will pass the Paddington Canal without being seduced by Payne and Mackinlay's example,—I say Payne and Mackinlay, supposing that the partnership held good. Drury, the villain, has not written to me; 'I am never ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... said Justice Chester, he is a pestilent fellow, there is not such a fellow in the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... themselves by oaths to the number of three hundred, and were about to fall upon the rest of their fellow citizens, whom they now in their turn regarded as the democratic party. Meanwhile they put to death one Hyperbolus, an Athenian, a pestilent fellow that had been ostracized, not from fear of his influence or position, but because he was a rascal and a disgrace to the city; being aided in this by Charminus, one of the generals, and by some of the Athenians with them, to ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides

... helpless man is a popular speaker and lecturer—one who does not deliver his harangues in high places, but rides on his donkey from village to village, spreading the doctrines now acceptable to the rural population. By the upper classes he is abhorred as a specially obnoxious and pestilent person. He, on the other hand, considers himself oppressed. He was a National Schoolmaster, but got into a scrape about a threatening letter, which, it is fair to state, was not completely brought home ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... much of that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here's our fellow Shakespeare' (fellow is used in the sense of companion), 'puts them all downe, ay, and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.' At Burbage's request, one of the University men then recites two lines of 'Richard III.,' by ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires, with a syren sweetness, drawing the mind to the serpent's tail of sinful fancies; and herein, especially, comedies give the largest field to ear, as Chaucer saith; how, both in other nations and ours, before poets did soften us, we were full of courage, given to martial exercises, the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney

... 'That pestilent fellow!' Colonel Halkett ejaculated. 'I understand he has had the impudence to serve a notice on Grancey Lespel about ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Naples,' says Guicciardini, 'though he dissembled his grief, told the queen, his wife, with tears—tears which he was wont to check even at the death of his own sons—that a Pope had been made who would prove most pestilent to the whole Christian commonwealth.' The young Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, again, showed his discernment of the situation by whispering in the Conclave to his kinsman Cibo: 'We are in the wolf's jaws; he will gulp us down, unless we make our flight good.' Besides, there was in Italy ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... re-classify, to make sure that at every point your classes correspond to realities. In the effort to carry out these principles, Bentham at least brought innumerable questions to a sound test, and exploded many pestilent fallacies. If he did not succeed further, if whole spheres of thought remained outside of his vision, it was because in his day there was not only no science of 'sociology' or psychology—there are no such ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen

... the sixth." The heathen origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on account of him who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnised because of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... they expected. They had not in their minds the soil out of which such imaginations would grow. They were perfectly unprepared to believe it, and, as a matter of fact, they did not believe until they had seen. So I think that that one fact disposes of a great deal of pestilent and shallow talk in these days that tries to deny the Resurrection and to save the character of the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... presence of the farmer and his son; and, so far as they were concerned, he had no fears for the future. The redoubtable Tom retired to one corner of the room, and, full of terror, awaited the issue. The father was the braver of the two, and stood in the middle of the floor, confronting the pestilent Yankee who had thus so unceremoniously ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic

... flatter him was to try to deceive him. In 1604, there was in Oxford a certain Richard Haydock, a Bachelor of Physic. This Haydock practised his profession during the day like other mortals, but varied from the kindly race of men by a pestilent habit of preaching all night. It was Haydock's contention that he preached unconsciously in his sleep, when he would give out a text with the greatest gravity, and declare such sacred matters as were revealed to him in slumber, "his preaching coming ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... did it seem for a lawsuit to make any progress, while Matthew Fabens was Justice of the Peace, in Summerfield. Pestilent Tilly was always scheming to provoke such evils, and was always threatening his neighbors with a lawsuit. Sometimes he would come post-haste for a warrant, or summons, or attachment; again, he would be in hot distress to swear his life was in danger, or his squalid character was at stake; or his ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... last, each private Scottish man is urged to judge of what claimed to be the original truth, even against an admittedly ancient system. And 'If that system was an error in the beginning, so it is in the end, and the longer that it be followed, and the more that do receive it, it is the more pestilent, and more ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes

... steadfast, and the legate should fail to gain possession of his person, he was empowered "to proscribe him in every part of Germany; to banish, curse, and excommunicate all those who are attached to him."(180) And further, the pope directed his legate, in order entirely to root out the pestilent heresy, to excommunicate all, of whatever dignity in church or state, except the emperor, who should neglect to seize Luther and his adherents, and deliver them up ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... to all such widely founded laws; there are poisonous berries of scarlet, and pestilent skies that are fair. But, if we once honestly compare a venomous wood-fungus, rotting into black dissolution of dripped slime at its edges, with a spring gentian; or a puff adder with a salmon trout, or a fog in Bermondsey with a clear sky at Berne, we ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... own, there is even a show of public virtue. He who is a captious, impracticable, dissatisfied member of his little club or coterie is immediately set down as a bad member of the community in general, as no friend to regularity and order, as 'a pestilent fellow,' and one who is incapable of sympathy, attachment, or cordial co-operation in any department or undertaking. Thus the most refractory novice in such matters becomes weaned from his obligations to the larger society, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... Likely enough if a man eats pickled pig's feet at midnight or drinks unlimited whisky, even a silk or cotton nightcap may not consign him to the arms of Morpheus; but it may work wonders for a sober person who is cursed with the pestilent habit of conjuring up all manner or odd fancies when his head touches the pillow, instead of dismissing the workmen who hammer on the forges of the brain. The majority of the men will rather suffer nocturnal horrors than be laughed at for wearing nightcaps; just ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... My Lord, I have no great acquaintance with this man, nor do I desire to have further knowledge of him; however, this I know, that he is a very pestilent fellow, from some discourse that, the other day, I had with him in this town; for then, talking with him, I heard him say, that our religion was naught, and such by which a man could by no means please God. Which sayings of his, my Lord, your Lordship very well knows, what necessarily thence ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan

... extremes of too much faith and none— Till, betwixt ancient trash and new, 'Twixt Cant and Blasphemy—the two Rank ills with which this age is curst— We can no more tell which is worst, Than erst could Egypt, when so rich In various plagues, determine which She thought most pestilent and vile, Her frogs, like Benbow and Carlisle, Croaking their native mud-notes loud, Or her fat locusts, like a cloud Of pluralists, obesely lowering, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... fortune that confounded everybody. The detested guardians of the city jail were themselves to tenant it; or, by a worse fate still, were to be consigned unpitied, and their case unjudged, to the dark and pestilent dungeons which lay below the Landgrave's castle. A few scattered cries of triumph were heard from the crowd; but they were drowned in a tumult of conflicting feelings. As human creatures, fallen under the displeasure ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... eternity. Absorbed in the materialistic game, or frittered and jaded in frivolous diversions, all eternal aims go by default. In what precious age was maddening rivalry so universal, giggling laughter so pestilent an epidemic, triviality at such a premium and sublimity at such a discount? But the things to which men really devote themselves dilate to fill the whole field of their vision. They soon come to disbelieve that for which they take no thought and make no sacrifice or investment. The average men ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... rioters, and fighters, and drinkers, and despisers of niggers—they are a passionate, impulsive, warm-hearted, generous people, much given to powerful indignations, which break out suddenly when they are not compelled to smoulder sullenly—pestilent sympathisers too, and with a sufficient dose of American atmospheric air in their lungs, properly mixed with a right proportion of ardent spirits, there is no saying but what they might actually take to sympathy with the slaves, and I leave you to judge of the possible consequences. ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... It's too much to remember the past— Here, amid shrimps, and agilities nameless; Glaciers gigantic, and Restaurants vast Chime not with sands and a tablecloth shameless; Smoking a pestilent, sea-side cigar, Mewed in a lodging with children and nurses, Epitaphs gorgeous of far "Dolce far," Curse ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various

... with a special aromatic flavour as of musk or benzoin, for either of which it can be substituted. Gerard says: "If you do but take a piece of the root, and hold it in your mouth, or chew the same between your teeth, it doth most certainly drive away pestilent aire." Icelanders eat both the stem and the roots raw with butter. These parts of the plant, if wounded, yield a yellow juice which becomes, when dried, a valuable medicine beneficial in chronic rheumatism and gout. Some have said the Archangelica was ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... King had done with Jack now that Jack's College had lent the money, and Blagge's physician could not abide me because I would not sit silent and see him butcher the sick. (He was a College of Physicians man!) So Blagge, I say, thrust us both out, with many vile words, for a pair of pestilent, prating, ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling

... strange, certainly, if the race did not show an improvement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured and studiously cared for; the labor which is required ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... to make room for this stupendous palace is open to doubt. It was naturally believed at the time, and, in order to divert suspicion from himself, he turned it upon those persons for whom the Roman populace had at that moment the greatest contempt, because, as the historian puts it, of their pestilent superstition and of a profound suspicion that they harboured a "hatred of the human race." These were the new sect of the Christians, and with burning Christians did Nero proceed to light up his gardens on one famous night, as a means of placating the populace whom he had offended, but ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... ye pretend to worshipp godd in your going to Masses / and to entreate hym to be mercifull vnto yow / ye do not most mightyly kindle his wrathe against you by hearinge of theise Masses: which as ye playnly do se / ar nothing els but a shamfull deuise sett vpp to deface the deathe of christe / a pestilent practise fownde out to ouerthrowe the true vse of the Lordes supper / and an Idolatrie inuented to infect the poeple and to make them Idolatrors. whearby eich man may easily iudge / how great a synne it is / to be partaker ...
— A Treatise of the Cohabitation Of the Faithful with the Unfaithful • Peter Martyr

... rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon's track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from torrid to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... Bradley explains his puzzling conduct very plausibly: it is no use being factious and hindering business in the House, as he says. And it can't be denied that there's Tory members in the House as factious as any of them pestilent Radical chaps that get up strikes out of doors. I'm not saying that you would be one of ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged—hanged. I thought with horror of the possibility that I might sicken and die in that wilderness of houses, nothing above me but "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." Overcome with dread, I rose and bestirred myself. Blinds drawn, lamp lit, and by a blazing fire, I tried to make believe that it ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... much trouble and uneasiness. I should rather say that they alone cause us any; for as for the rest, what with their drowsiness, their plethora, their folly, and their vanity, they are doing us anything but mischief. These fellows are a pestilent set of heretics, whom we would gladly see burnt; they are, with the most untiring perseverance, and in spite of divers minatory declarations of the holy father, scattering their books abroad through all Europe, and have caused many people in Catholic countries to think that hitherto ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow

... think, that I grew conscious of, was dreariness. There was nothing interesting anywhere. What should I do? There was nothing to do, nothing to think about, not a book worth reading. Story was suddenly dried up at its fountain. Life was a plain without water-brooks. If the sky was not "a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours," it was nothing better than a canopy of gray and blue. By degrees my thought settled on what I had done, and in a moment I realized it as it was—a vile thing, and I had lost my life for it! This is the nearest I can come to the expression ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald

... smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphosis,[xi:1] and talke too much of Proserpina and Juppiter. Why, heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I,[xi:2] and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow! he brought vp Horace giuing the Poets a pill,[xi:3] but our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen him a purge that made ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp

... judgements of her most confidential counsellors. Some advised that the royal captive should be spared the ignominy of any public proceeding; but that her attendants should be removed, and her custody rendered so severe as to preclude all possibility of her renewing her pestilent intrigues. Leicester, in conformity with the baseness and atrocity of his character, is related to have suggested the employment of treachery against the life of a prisoner whom it appeared equally dangerous to spare or to punish; ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... a packet or concoct a mixture; but it was an old lady who held him in talk for ten minutes about rates of postage to South America. When, by rare luck, he had a prescription to dispense (the hideous scrawl of that pestilent Dr. Bunker) in came somebody with letters and parcels which he was requested to weigh; and his hand shook so with rage that he could not resume his dispensing for the next quarter of an hour. People asked extraordinary questions, and were surprised, offended, when ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... immediately by continual vomiting. Two missionaries and my French servant, who partook of my food, exhibited almost the same symptoms. Not suspecting the true cause of these ailments, I attributed them to climate and the locality, and especially to the pestilent winds which had brought an epidemic ophthalmia among the natives. Things remained in this condition a fortnight without improvement, when one morning at breakfast a marmalade of bananas was served. I had hardly touched it to my lips when the nausea returned with greater violence; ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... till we reach the Tennessee river, thence along the course of that stream, turning northwardly to the Ohio, or more properly, perhaps, to the southern line of Kentucky, we exclude the most pestilent portion of Tennessee, of which Memphis is the capital, and retain the middle and eastern parts, along with Eastern Kentucky and Western Virginia. Thence passing westward with the southern line of Missouri to the Indian Territory, thence southward with the western line of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... morrow." Here we might stand and take a look of the crookedness and perverseness of man's spirit since his departure from God. Self love and pride were the first poison that the malice of Satan dropped into man's nature, and this is so strong and pestilent, that it has spread through the whole of mankind, and the whole in every man. Every one is infected, and all in every one. What are all the disordered affections in men but so many streams from this fountain? And from these do men's affections flow next, so that there is nothing left uncorrupted, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... shave off the Kazi's beard, except he fear my resentment and adjudge the bag to be my bag.' Now when the Kazi heard what I and the Kurd avouched, he was confounded and said, 'I see ye twain be none other than two pestilent fellows, atheistical-villains who make sport of Kazis and magistrates and stand not in fear of reproach. Never did tongue tell nor ear hear aught more extraordinary than that which ye pretend. By Allah, from China to Shajarat ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... answered the other, "are that he is to be kept in this cabin until we have finally disposed of these three pestilent English ships; and when that is done, and we have captured them, he is to be locked up in the fore hold, with the other prisoners we shall take—if the rascals do not in this case fight to the death, as they often do. ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... that the anaconda kills its prey by its pestilent breath, is wholly fabulous. Waterton altogether denies the existence of any odour in the snake's breath. It is possible, however, that some species may produce a horrible stench, from a substance secreted in certain glands near the tail—a fact which ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... Potts. "However, it may do. We will help you in the matter, good Humphrey Etcetera. You shall not be troubled with these pestilent witches much longer. The neighbourhood shall ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... ungoverned feminine imagination can coin in sickliest indolence,—ball-room amours, combats of curled knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties, charities in costume,—a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish vanity—impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir, and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural veracity; the faces falsely drawn—the lights falsely cast—the forms effaced or distorted, and all common human ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... dross of the nations?" However, the rulers of the Church grew more and more alarmed at the circulation of the book. At length Archbishop Arundel, a zealous but not very learned prelate, complained to the Pope of "that pestilent wretch, John Wycliffe, the son of the old Serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist, who had completed his iniquity by inventing a new translation of the Scriptures"; and, shortly after, the Convocation of Canterbury forbade such translations, under ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... goads us with fiercer despair (Those who buy, you perpend, stock, debenture or share, Such as speculate mainly; investors are rare—) Than this growl ill-conditioned of pestilent Bear! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various

... 1510 the ecclesiastical court pronounced the dread sentence against the rats of Autun, Macon, and Lyons. These examples are sufficient precedents. It will be well for the council, however, not to publish the bull either just before or just after a rain; for nothing can kill this pestilent heresy when ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... always praised more? But suddenly a bitter and unfounded reproach escapes him. England is responsible for his having become faithless to his monastic vows, 'for no other reason do I hate Britain more than for this, though it has always been pestilent ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... with a 'silver spoon in my mouth,' it has stuck in my throat, and spoiled my palate, so that nothing put into it is swallowed with much relish,—unless it be cayenne. However, I have grievances enough to occupy me that way too;—but for fear of adding to yours by this pestilent long diatribe, I postpone the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... were only separated for about a year; but it may fairly be assumed that, had the King lived twenty years, Wesley would not have returned to his wife unless she had signified to him that she had renounced her pestilent scepticism. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... his sonne tracking the Foxe so running away, came to that pit whereof I spake, and in the bottome thereof he found many bones of dead men, deceiued by the deuill after that sort in time past. Thus deliuered he his father from present death, and all other from so pestilent ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt

... man, bating he is a pestilent Roundhead and Puritan," said Whitaker, "is no bad neighbour. What has ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... either indulging themselves in their delights in subject, or pluming themselves on their noble motives for attempting what they cannot perform; (and observe, by the way, that a great deal of what is mistaken for conscientious motive is nothing but a very pestilent, because very subtle, condition of vanity); whereas the great men always understand at once that the first morality of a painter, as of everybody else, is to know his business; and so earnest are they in this, that many, whose ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... Apulia, the thirsty and arid, Exhaled a more baleful or pestilent dew, And the gift, which invincible Hercules carried, Burned not to his bones more ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... tic been lately? I had one fiery night when this same dragon "tic" held me for some hours with pestilent violence. It still comes at intervals with abated fury. Owing to this and broken sleep, I am looking singularly charming, one of my true London looks—starved out and worn down. Write soon, dear ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... Centurion, humbly; "but it is thus. We have here"—and he jerked his thumb towards me—"a magician of the most pestilent—um, I crave his pardon—of the very best sort, for he hath but just now, only by placing his eyes close to the nose of the worthy Captain Paulus, dragged him, the said Paulus, through the gates that Paulus swore the magician should not pass. ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... clearly rid of such pestilent fancies with very full contempt of them, making a cross upon their hearts and bidding the devil avaunt. And sometimes they laugh him to scorn too, and then turn their mind unto some other matter. And when the devil hath seen that they ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More

... instead an insufferable clerk of his at Plumstead, who had lost all his teeth, and whom the archdeacon hardly knew how to get rid of by other means.) There was living at Barchester a young man, a surgeon, named John Bold, and both Mr. Harding and Dr. Grantly were well aware that to him was owing the pestilent rebellious feeling which had shown itself in the hospital; and the renewal, too, of that disagreeable talk about Hiram's estates which was again prevalent in Barchester. Nevertheless, Mr. Harding and Mr. Bold were acquainted with each other, and were friends in spite of the great ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... eyelids, "do you believe 't was Mazarin provided it? Pooh! 'T was a present made me by M. de la Motte, who seeks my interest with my Lord Cardinal to obtain for him an appointment in his Eminence's household, and thus thinks to earn my good will. He's a pestilent creature, this la Motte," he added, with a hiccough,—"a pestilent creature; but, Sangdieu! his wine is good, and I'll speak to my uncle. Help me up, De Luynes. Help me up, I say; I would drink the health ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini

... a fatal blot upon his conqueror's memory, but it should not be forgotten that Edward was profoundly convinced of the legality of his own claims over Scotland, and that Wallace to him was merely a pestilent rebel, who had earned his doom by treason to his lord and by the cruelties he had inflicted upon Englishmen. The same year the king prepared a new constitution for the conquered kingdom, divided it ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... the Turks and Saracens. He had to do with the seed of Abraham, whereof there were three sorts. The ten tribes were all degenerated from the true worshipping of God, and corrupted with idolatry, as this day are our pestilent papists in all realms and nations; there rested only the tribe of Judah at Jerusalem, where the form of true religion was observed, the law taught, and the ordinances of God outwardly kept. But yet there were in that body, ...
— The Pulpit Of The Reformation, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. • John Welch, Bishop Latimer and John Knox

... me!" Replied she, "At once I will devise for thee to do away his life." "How so?" asked he; and she answered, "By means of our female slave the so-called Bakun." Now this Bakun was past mistress in all kinds of knavery and was one of the most pestilent of old women, in whose religion to abstain from wickedness was not lawful; she had brought up Kuzia Fakan and Kanmakan who had her in so great affection that he used to sleep at her feet. So when King Sasan heard his wife name her, he said, "Right is this recking"; and, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... such pestilent Eves," Tristan answered. "That slender fellow in the purple jerkin is one Ren de Montigny, of gentle birth, and a great breaker of commandments. He with the red hair is Guy Tabarie; they are sworn brothers in bawdry ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... represented were more or less formidable to human life. In the same spirit, every experiment in civilisation has passed for a crime among those engaged in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed an insidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any material obstacle a literal devil; while to possess some unusual passion, however innocent, has brought obloquy on every one unfortunate enough not to be constituted like the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... suffering poor themselves. That many who sought to do some little to repair the social wrongs, inflicted in the way of preventible sickness and death upon the poor, were strengthening those wrongs, however innocently, by wasting money on pestilent knaves cumbering society. That imagination, - soberly following one of these knaves into his life of punishment in jail, and comparing it with the life of one of these poor in a cholera- stricken alley, or one of the children of one of these poor, soothed in its dying hour by ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... Robert Belcher, was a gross libel upon that gentleman, and intended, by the malicious writer, to injure an honorable and innocent man. It is only another instance of the ingratitude of rural communities toward their benefactors. We congratulate the redoubtable Colonel on his removal from so pestilent a neighborhood to a city where his sterling qualities will find 'ample scope and verge enough,' and where those who suffer 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' will not lay them to the charge ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland

... limited resources would allow. His knowledge of Cuban woodcraft was much greater now than it had been two weeks earlier, and within fifteen minutes he had constructed a rude hammock of tough vines, over which was laid a great palm-leaf. This would at least swing him clear of the ground, with its pestilent dampness and swarming land-crabs. Although he knew that he should suffer from cold before morning, he dared not light a fire, for it would be almost certain to attract unwelcome attention. So he lined his swinging-bed with such dried grasses as he could find, and nestling ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe

... to say, sir," roared the General, whose eyes were protruding from his head, "that my plan will be carried out if every pestilent political in Granthistan is opposed to it. It's high time you came back to duty, sir. You seconded subalterns think no small beer of yourselves, I know, but you'll learn better here, I can tell you, and you'll ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier

... from 20,000 to 26,000 francs each. They lived in Catalonia. When the French troops entered Spain in 1808 General Canclaux, a friend of the Prince de Conti, brought to the notice of Napoleon that the tiresome formalities insisted on by the pestilent clerks of all nations were observed towards these regal personages. Gaudin, the Minister of Finance, apparently on his own initiative, drew up a decree increasing the pensions to 80,000 francs, and doing away ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... with the Romans. The Jesuits, however, were even less popular than he, and certainly received a much larger share of abuse. For the Romans love faction more than party, and understand it better; so that popular opinion is too frequently represented by a transitory frenzy, violent and pestilent while it lasts, utterly insignificant when it has ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... Sir Richard was a pestilent innovator, it is certain. Before his time the Hall had been a fine block of the mellowest red brick; but Sir Richard had travelled in Italy and become infected with the Italian taste, and, having more money than his predecessors, he determined to leave an Italian ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... Saturday, under the semblance of a wealthy member of my congregation. It were a great blessing, if every particular of what in the sum we call popular sentiment could carry about the name of its manufacturer stamped legibly upon it. I gave a stab under the fifth rib to that pestilent fallacy,—"Our country, right or wrong,"—by tracing its original to a speech of Ensign Cilley at a dinner of the ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... rob the Monks of their prey. And then, being soothingly addressed by Mr. Hodge, he admitted that the Friars were for the greater part Beggars and Thieves; and before supper-time we obtained an easy permission from him to drive those Pestilent Gentry from the doors, and deny him on every occasion when they should be impudent enough to seek admission ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... the same colour swimming in it; marshes formed by the standing waters of Acheron, and the mountain whose roots go down to hell. The terrible aspect of this place, the thick shades with which it is covered by a surrounding wood, and the pestilent odour which this water exhales, characterize it very justly as the Tartarus of the poets. There wants only the boat of Charon, which, however, would be unnecessary, as there is only a shallow ford to pass over. The ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... futurity to warn her. She came with so much hope, so eagerly, to her new kingdom, so full of pleasure and interest and readiness to hear and see, and to be pleased with everything—even John Knox, that pestilent preacher, of whom she must have heard so much; he who had written the book against women which naturally made every woman indignant yet curious, keenly desirous to see him, to question him, to put him on his defence. I think great injustice has been done to both in ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... shore, "deafening the sound of the westerly wave, and riding against the blast as thunder goes," to borrow O'Connell's graphic and grandiose phrases, had reached the country in advance of Mr. Garrison. The national sensitiveness was naturally enough stung to the quick. Here is a pestilent fellow who is not content with disturbing the peace of the Union with his new fanaticism, but must needs presume to make the dear Union odious before the world as well. And his return, what is it to be but the signal ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... and, as the object wavered about in the comparative calm under the tree, drifting closer to him, started to obey. But it suddenly approached his face, and seized with a reckless terror, he snatched off his hat and batted at it as one would at a pestilent bee. Instantly there was a blinding glare, a stunning detonation, and a violent air-wave which threw me clear off my feet and to the ground. I sat up blindly with my vision full of opalescent lights and my ears ringing, unable to hear, see, ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby

... Middlesex, in Somerset and Devon, in York, Northumberland, and Cumberland, the attack upon witches on the part of the people was going on with undiminished vigor. If no great discoveries were made, if no nests of the pestilent creatures were unearthed, the justices of the peace were kept quite as busy with examinations ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... imminent jeopardy, in attemptingto pat Beauty on the head. It is to be hoped his advances to the mistress will be more favourably received, as all his overtures towards a caress are greeted by the pestilent little cur with a wary kindling of the eye, and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... seemed to be uncleanliness, gluttony, immoderate drinking, and also severe inundations leaving decaying vegetation. Richmond's army has been considered a factor in the germination of the seeds of pestilent disorder which broke out soon after in the camps of Litchfield, and on ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... who did execute this greuous punishment, euen by the handes of those, whom he suffred twise to be ouercomen in batel, doth this day retein his power and iustice. Cursed Iesabel of England, with the pestilent and detestable generation of papistes, make no litle bragge and boast, that they haue triumphed not only against Wyet, but also against all such as haue entreprised any thing against them or their procedinges. But let her and them consider, that yet they haue not preuailed against god, his throne ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox

... applause for leaving the two young people so soon when they have all one evening and another morning to be together—but subconsciously she knows that she has done her best by her recent little speech to make this talking-it-over a walk through a field full of small pestilent burrs, for both Oliver and Nancy. They say au revoir very politely—all four—the door shuts ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... make her revise her ideas of revelation; and our progress in psychology and moral philosophy should suggest to her to re-state her theology of the Incarnation. Every one can see that there is a grain of truth in this kind of talk. But it is, on the whole, a pestilent and dangerous heresy. If the formulas of modern science contradict the science of Catholic dogma, it is the former that must be altered, not the latter. If modern metaphysics are incompatible with the metaphysical terms and expressions adopted by councils and explained by the Catholic schools, then ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge

... or it would become insupportable. But then, again, the thought would come back that every hour that passed without an alarm was another step towards a safe haven; and who could say that in a week or so things might not be, at least, no worse than they were before this pestilent little galvanic battery ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... doctored by the head of the Press Bureau, caused great anger in some quarters. But for my part I rather welcomed it. Anything that would help to bring home to the public what they were up against was to the good. Whoever first made use of that pestilent phrase "business as usual," whether it was a Cabinet Minister, or a Fleet Street scribe, or some gag-merchant on the music-hall stage, had ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... so great a sacrifice of taste? Their model must have been a toad with a stick thrust through it (three of which, so impaled and hung up in the sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of "pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of railroad, whose cars look like the joints of a monstrous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... saying?" and stopped as if the heavens and the earth must refuse to go round on their axes because of this introduction into Parliament of the negligences of private conversation. Mr. Gibbs—a very pestilent and very empty member of the young army of silly obstructives—moved that the words be taken down—an ancient formula not heard of for years till the present Session, when everything is turned to account for the purpose of occupying time and breaking down the House of Commons, and ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... their wretched lives ended with sordid deaths, and the very cost of their burial would have come from the pockets of pinched workers. I fancy that I have shown the advisability of neglecting strict economic canons in this instance. I abhor the pestilent beings who swarm in certain quarters, and I should never dream of removing any burden from their shoulders if I thought that it would only leave the rascals with more money to expend on brutish pleasures; but I desire to look far ahead, and I can see that, when the present ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... blight of the blind, And horror comes into the heart; For nature is far more unkind Than the thousands that struggle apart. Dark, wild, inescapable dust, In fiercest, untamable clouds, That men into misery helplessly thrust, And bury in agony-shrouds; A simoom of sorrow whose pestilent breath To the strong and the weak, to the young and the old, Brings despair that is reckless of possible gain, And the awfullest anguish of death; Till the soul in its rage uncontrolled, Droops low in the horrible sickness ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller

... that you are bound—if a true sportsman—to protect the song birds, and the birds that are useful in destroying noxious vermin, and all the beautiful feathered creatures that ornament our woods, and fields, and parks, from the depredations of the ignorant, loutish, pestilent, pernicious pot-hunter. The Sportsmen's Clubs that have been organized throughout the country should be supported by every true sportsman; and if you lay a thick stick vigorously across the back of the first fool ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various

... life of mind Mr. Eagles's letter is. Such letters always bring me to think of Harriet Martineau's pestilent plan of doing to destruction half of the intellectual life of the world, by suppressing every mental breath breathed through the post office. She was not in a state of clairvoyance when she said such a thing. I have not heard from her, but ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... in the sultry and pestilent steam which rose up from the floor. Gnats and flies of all kinds buzzed in the heavy air, or settled in black knots on the walls and the rafters. With a bunch of dried maize-leaves he drove them off the old man's face and hands ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... same way of thinking as Hogarth. Writing of a speech made at the Oxford Commemoration of 1754 by the Jacobite Dr. King (see post, Feb. 1755), he said:—'There cannot be a greater instance of the lenity of the government he abuses than his pestilent harangues so publicly made with impunity furnishes (sic) all his readers with.'—Rich. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... thing; and as we believe that Keats was made presumptuous chiefly by the treacherous puffing of his cockney fellow gossips, and profligate in his poems merely to make them saleable, we regret that he did not live long enough to acquire common sense, and abjure the pestilent and perfidious gang who betrayed his weakness to the grave, and are now panegyrising his memory into contempt. For what is the praise of cockneys but disgrace, or what honourable inscription can be placed over the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... their children to Catholic institutions, and will not have them tempted or corrupted by the evil influences, moral, social, and intellectual, that emanate and surround those "whited sepulchres"—the godless schools—as the miasm emanates and surrounds the pestilent marsh. In all these schools the children are carefully trained in Christian practices, prayers, and religious duties, as well as taught a good, plain, practical course of studies. In fact, they are truly educated; while in the Public Schools they are simply instructed, ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... Baghdad, so perchance we shall win our father's stipend for ourselves." Replied the old trot, "As thy head liveth, O my daughter, I will play off higher-class rogueries in Baghdad than ever played Calamity Ahmad or Hasan the Pestilent." So saying, she rose and threw over her face the Lisam-veil and donned clothes such as the poorer Sufis wear, petticoat-trousers falling over her heels, and a gown of white wool with a broad girdle. She also took a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... nature of the illness, while agreeing about the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half would call blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree about the bad public house. It would be precisely ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... idea which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect, were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced, is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would mean something. On the contrary, however, anybody who makes a tour through fashionable rooms ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous

... unsurpassed; and it is some satisfaction to reflect that even in Mr Stamer's day the bad old oppressive system had already been somewhat tempered for the benefit of these white slaves, who for nearly half the round of the year were worse treated than King Bomba's unhappy victims in the pestilent prisons ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... be said that the abstract Utilitarian doctrine reached its high-water mark in Mill's book on the Subjection of Women, to which Mr. Stephen allots one section of a chapter. The book is a particular enlargement upon Mill's general view that it is a pestilent error to regard such marked distinctions of human character as sex or race as innate and in the main indelible. What is called the nature of women he treats as an artificial thing, an isolated fact which need not at any rate be recognised by law; the proper test was, he argued, to leave free ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... forces, the hunger-struggle of nations, were shaking the roof above their heads. Theoretically they knew it. But they could escape in time; they had a cosy little corner preserved for themselves, safe from these pestilent worries. Fate has a grudge against the foolishly secure. If he laughed ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... Melville, 'that the measure had anticipated his resignation. His baggage is seized at his quarters, and at Tully-Veolan, and is found to contain a stock of pestilent jacobitical pamphlets, enough to poison a whole country, besides the unprinted lucubrations of his worthy friend and tutor ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... is ther sent ouer to be prynted the booke that Frythe made last against the blessed sacrament answering to my letter, wherewyth I confuted the pestilent treatice that he hadde made agaynst it before. And the brethen looked for it nowe at thys Bartlemewe tide last passed, and yet looke euery day, except it be come all redy, and secretly runne among them. But in the meane whyle, ther is come ouer a nother booke againste ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various

... favourite. I well-nigh lost mine office, because one frosty morning Master Varney thought I smelled of aqua vitae; and this fellow can appear before him drunk as a wineskin, and yet meet no rebuke. But then he is a pestilent clever fellow withal, and no one can understand above one half ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... nature betweene themselues. The first, by reason of his continuall heat conuerteth into a stone any body cast into it, the former shape only still remaining. The second is extremely cold. The third is sweeter then honey, and most pleasant to quench thirst. The fourth is altogether deadly, pestilent, and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... myself the standing defence of all your honours, and paid the duty I owed to our friendship—long in arrear, but interrupted by the great complexity of events—to the very utmost. Not, believe me, that the will to shew you attention and honour was ever wanting to me; but certain pestilent persons—vexed at another's fame—did at times alienate you from me, and sometimes changed my feelings towards you. But I have got the opportunity, for which I had rather wished than hoped, of shewing you in the very ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... for King Charles! Pym and his snarls 20 To the Devil that pricks on such pestilent carles! Hold by the right, you double your might; So, onward to Nottingham, deg. fresh for the ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning

... care not a fig for the Renaissance or its morals. I count its people but a pestilent herd of daubers, rhymers, cutthroats, and courtesans. Their hubris has lost its glamour of beauty and has coarsened into vulgar insolence. They offend me by their riotous swagger, their insistence ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... (swinging his hand at her and missing her) Daughter, you've such a pestilent hussy there I can't live with her longer, without sin. I can't discuss things in the state I'm in. My mind's so flustered by her insolent talk, To calm myself, I ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere

... judge me by that rule. Carolinians, sir, always appreciate intelligent strangers, for they always exert a healthy influence, and never meddle with our institutions; so you see it wouldn't do to follow the pestilent notions of petty scribblers, lest ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams

... disappointed Nullifiers and a few uncompromising Abolitionists, and we can recollect the time when Calhoun and Garrison were both classed by practical statesmen of the South and North in one category of pestilent "abstractionists." Negro Slavery was considered simply as a fact; and general irritation among most politicians of all sections was sure to follow any attempt to explore the principles on which the fact reposed. That these principles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... invention he would not be able to raise the necessary fees for a patent, or to get any one to help him thereto. The manufacturer "makes what his customers call for." Why should he spend his money and spoil his plant to introduce improvements? So things go, until some pestilent Yankees flood the markets with better articles at a lower price; and British consumers suddenly discover that they want something that the native manufacturer cannot make. The need was there; but invention did not follow. How happened it that the American ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various

... most mischievous journal in the world. People try to treat it as a negligible quantity when they disagree with it. But I have seen as much of the surface of the country and as much of its people as most men, and I have found the pestilent print everywhere, and everywhere have found it influential. For some time past it has been telling blood-curdling stories of the iniquities of prison rule in Tasmania, with the tacit conclusion that nothing but ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... being many other more fruitful knowledges, a man might better spend his time in them, than in this. Secondly, that it is the mother of lies. Thirdly, that it is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires: with a siren's sweetness, drawing the mind to the serpent's tail of sinful fancy. And herein especially, comedies give the largest field to err, as Chaucer saith: how both in other nations and ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... defensive being a negligible factor at sea, or even the mere pestilent heresy it is generally represented, it is of course inherent in all war, and, as we have seen, the paramount questions of strategy both at sea and on land turn on the relative possibilities of offensive and defensive, and upon the relative proportions in which each should ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... the other day that they considered this story to be of a pestilent example. I am not inclined to imagine we shall ever be put into any practical difficulty from a superfluity of Greenvilles. And besides, I demur to the opinion. The worth of such actions is not a thing to be decided in a quaver of sensibility or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... must deposit their eggs. You can hardly find them by day, for they are cunning and secrete themselves. "They love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil." They are a paltry looking, insignificant little grey-haired pestilent race of wax-and-honey-eating and bee-destroying rascals, that have baffled all contrivances that ingenuity has devised to ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... hundred thousand sightless persons, blind from babyhood, in Europe alone. Including America, and adding Asia, Africa and the islands of the South Seas, we shall find in the world half a million persons blind or one million sightless eyes, from this pestilent germ—at which many young men laugh as no worse than a cold and which is on sale all the time in every immoral ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various



Words linked to "Pestilent" :   noxious, epidemic, pestilence



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