"Pusillanimous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was ill and proved an incompetent emperor, entirely unequal to the serious task of governing and protecting his vast territories. His weakness was especially shown in his pusillanimous treaties with the Northmen. When Paris was making an heroic defense against them under its count, Odo, Charles, instead of marching at the head of an army to relieve it, agreed to pay the invaders seven hundred pounds of silver if they would raise ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the discovery of my loss rendered me for a long time unable to think clearly. My mind was dejected and pusillanimous— my brain, as it were, paralysed—so that whenever I took to thinking, my thoughts only wandered, or centred on the ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... brother Bartholomew, and leading the other himself; and when the brothers made an attack upon the Indians at the same time from different quarters, this numerous host was at once and utterly put to flight. In speaking of such a defeat, the modern reader must not be lavish of the words "cowardly," "pusillanimous," and the like, until, at least, he has well considered what it is to expose naked bodies to firearms, to the charge of steel-clad men on horseback, and to the ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... in them lies the difficulty. Occasional instances of splendid charges will undoubtedly occur in future warfare; but it seems to be an established fact that the day for the glory of cavalry has passed. Once the mailed knight, mounted on his mailed charger, could overthrow by scores the poor, pusillanimous pikemen and crossbow men who composed the infantry; he was invulnerable in his iron armor, and could ride them down like reeds. But gunpowder and the bayonet have changed this; and now the most confident and domineering cavalryman will put spurs to his horse and fly at a gallop, if he ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... imperfections in general. But our famous American sense of humor may be worked overtime, and, from a perception of the incongruity and relative importance of things, be insensibly degraded into pusillanimous indifference to everything, good or bad. The soberest observer may concede that there is a spiritual energy and movement behind visible phenomena, whose purport and aim it is the province of the wise to understand. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and singular, how shall I describe its appearance as seen from above? Sixteen jets of water seen at one glance, sixteen reservoirs, in all their diversity of form and construction, opening at once beneath the feet of the beholder, seemed almost too wonderful a sight. Forgetting all pusillanimous feelings, I stood and honoured the Creator in these his marvellous works. For a long time I stood, and could not tire of gazing into the abysses from whose darkness the masses of white and foaming water sprung hissing into ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... force is the imaginative and shadowy terror with which different minds recoil from death—not considered as an agony or torment, but considered as a mystery, and, next after God, as the most infinite of mysteries. In a brave man this terror may happen to be strong; in a pusillanimous man, simply through inertness and original feebleness of imagination, may happen to be scarcely developed. This oscillation of horror, alternating between death as an agony and death as a mystery, not only exists with a corresponding set of consequences accordingly as one or ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... impressions of his infinity, his power, and his love, should give a higher character to this eremitical enthusiasm, and attract men of loftier and more vigorous minds within its sphere. It was not merely the pusillanimous dread of encountering the trials of life which urged the humbler spirits to seek a safe retirement; or the natural love of peace, and the weariness and satiety of life, which commended this seclusion to those who were too gentle to mingle in, or who were exhausted with, the unprofitable turmoil ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... understand. The world turned black before Katharine. What! strike without a blow! Was this her hero? Rather death than a coward! In spite of her faith in her lover, as she heard what appeared to be a pusillanimous offer of surrender, Desborough's chances took a sudden bound upward, while that gentleman cursed the cowardice of his enemy and rival, which would deprive him of a pleasing opportunity of blowing him out of ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... pusillanimous about the Irishman, except when in cold blood he was expected to attack an agent, or landlord, or policeman, armed to the teeth. In such cases, he remembered that his parents, by the blessing of the Holy Virgin, had endowed him with ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... despair, but also to reduce him to the corpse-like obedience required by the Society of Jesus. In that awful book may be found a thousand terrors to operate on weak minds, a thousand slavish maxims to chain and degrade the pusillanimous soul. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Colonel Montgomery. This braggart asserted, in the House of Commons, "amidst the loudest cheering, that he knew the Americans very well, and was certain they would not fight; 'that they were not soldiers and never could be made so, being naturally pusillanimous and incapable of discipline; that a very slight force would be more than sufficient for their complete reduction'; and he fortified his statement by repeating their peculiar expressions, and ridiculing their religious ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... attempts upon the English centre. Prince Henry led his horse through the English left wing, but the infantry failed to follow, and the prince lost his advantage by a premature attempt to plunder. The Scottish right made a pusillanimous attempt on the English left, and the reserve began to desert King David, who collected the remnants of his army and retired in safety to a height above Cowton Moor, the scene of the fight. Prince Henry was left surrounded by the enemy, but saved the position ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... yon gray blank of sky, we might be faint To muse upon eternity's constraint Round our aspirant souls. But since the scope Must widen early, is it well to droop For a few days consumed in loss and taint? O pusillanimous Heart, be comforted,— And like a cheerful traveler, take the road, Singing beside the hedge. What if the bread Be bitter in thine inn, and thou unshod To meet the flints?—At least it may be said, "Because the way is short, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... for they know that it is their only road to prosperity. They look with hope and confidence to Maria Theresa, whose goodness and greatness may compensate them for all that they have endured at the hands of their pusillanimous little rulers. The only man in Germany who will oppose the succession of Austria to Bavaria, is Frederick, who is as ready to enlarge his own dominions as to cry 'Stop thief!' when he sees others doing likewise. But he will not raise a single voice unless he ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Cyprus, at that time ruled by Henry II a pusillanimous prince. Vertot. Hist. des Chev. de Malte, 1. iii. iv. The meaning appears to be, that the complaints made by those cities of their weak and worthless governor, may be regarded as an earnest of his condemnation at the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... the title of Ala ed-din Juhan-shah in September 1735.) But to this measure the concurrence of the other chiefs was wanting. At daybreak the guns of the castle began to play upon the mosque, and, some of the shot penetrating its walls, the pusillanimous Jemal al-alum, being alarmed at the danger, judged it advisable to retreat from thence and to set up his standard in another quarter, called kampong Jawa, his people at the same time retaining possession of the mosque. A regular warfare now ensued between the two parties and continued for ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... sent out above two thousand men, who were employed in the capture of Porto Bello and Rio de la Hacha. This caused a very favourable diversion for Bolivar in Venezuela, as it distracted the attention of the royalists, and but for the pusillanimous conduct of Macgregor, who commanded the expedition, might have proved of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... of the Present Deplorable State of New England, Boston, 1707. The Deplorable State of New England, by Reason of a Covetous and Treacherous Governour and Pusillanimous Counsellors, London, 1708. The first of the above is answered by a pamphlet called a Modest Inquiry. All three are reprinted in Mass. Hist. ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... on its way to Reno, with instructions to forward, when he began to experience a deep and growing sense of shame; it was a pusillanimous trick he was playing on his poor old woman-hating uncle. Contemplating a resumption of the conjugal state almost before the old gentleman was cold in his grave! It was contemptible. In no little dread he wondered if his uncle ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... Lust; how often, Britain, have I congratulated thy Happiness, where Virtue is rewarded, Vice discountenanc'd and punish'd; where the Man of Merit is provided for, and not oblig'd to pay a Levee to the kept Mistress of a Statesman; and where the Ignorant, Pusillanimous, and Vicious, however distinguish'd by Birth and Fortune, are held in Contempt, and ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... a situation so seriously compromised, it became necessary to hold council; after a brief deliberation, I rejected far, far from me, as puerile and pusillanimous, the project suggested to me by my vanity at bay, that of giving up my lodgings, and even of leaving the district entirely. I made up my mind to pursue philosophically the course of my labors and my pleasures, to show a soul superior to circumstances, and in short, to give to the Amazons, the centaurs, ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... A pusillanimous peace, always possible at any period At length the twig was becoming the tree Being the true religion, proved by so many testimonies Certainly it was worth an eighty years' war Chief seafaring nations of the world were already protestant Conceding it subsequently, ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... have done some of our neighbours; and no attempts have been made towards communism,—as has been the case with others. We have been laborious, contented, and prosperous; and if we have been reabsorbed by the mother country, in accordance with what I cannot but call the pusillanimous conduct of certain of our elder Britannulists, it has not been from any failure on the part of the island, but from the opposition with which the Fixed Period has ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... the streets of our capital; detaining the enemy at least for a day, my army will arrive, and we shall be strong enough to give battle. I must go to Paris; when I am not there, they do nothing but blunder! My brother Joseph is a pusillanimous and easily-disheartened man, and Minister Clarke is a blockhead. Marmont and Mortier are traitors deserving death, for they violated my express instructions. I asked them to hold out only two days, and the traitors capitulated before they had elapsed! Oh, I shall hold them ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... the puma of literature; for, although to those personally acquainted with the habits of this lesser lion of the New World it is known to possess a marvellous courage and daring, it is nevertheless always spoken of in books of natural history as the most pusillanimous of the larger carnivores. It does not attack man, and Azara is perfectly correct when he affirms that it never hurts, or threatens to hurt, man or child, even when it finds them sleeping. This, however, is not a full statement of the facts; the puma will not even defend itself ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... death cannot be endless. Be unconcerned; thy being shall as little be lost as the grain of dust at thy foot! Because in death thou dost not know that thou art, therefore fearest thou that thou shalt be no more? O pusillanimous! the great events of nature are too vast for thy weak heart. A whole eternity thou hast not been conscious that thou art, and yet thou hast become conscious of it. Every night thou losest thy consciousness, yet art thou conscious again, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... happened that a man who was both mediocre and pusillanimous, without education, without ideas, without knowledge, without force of character, and who might be expected not to succeed in the slipperiest city in the world, came by his principles of conduct, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... weakens their constitutions, and when once the body has lost its powers, those of the soul are not easily preserved. Application wears out the machine, exhausts the spirits, destroys the strength, enervates the mind, makes us pusillanimous, unable either to bear fatigue, or to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... army within their sacred frontier, and worked up by all the circumstances of the invasion to the highest pitch of patriotic enthusiasm. Unable to appreciate the value of what must have appeared to them a timid and pusillanimous policy, they overwhelmed Barclay de Tolly with violent accusations of cowardice, and even of treachery; rendered the more plausible to the mind of the ignorant, by the circumstance of their object being a foreigner—or at least of foreign blood. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... soldiers abandoned their own, and the public defence; and their pusillanimous indolence may be considered as the immediate cause of the downfall of the empire." Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... no doubt, that many honest people are sincerely religious without profit; but is uprightness of heart always accompanied with intelligence? We are cited to a great number of learned men, men of genius, who are very religious. This proves that men of genius can have prejudices, can be pusillanimous, can have an imagination which seduces them and prevents them from examining objects coolly. Pascal proves nothing in favor of religion, except that a man of genius can possess a grain of weakness, and is but a child when he is weak enough to listen to prejudices. Pascal himself ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... even a sort of kind rejoinder to the various ferments kept up by the truculent twins, the pusillanimous exhorter, and the terrified Basile. Its preachment might well have been less obvious, though lines, its author bade Hugh notice, never overbalanced action, never came till situation called them. It was to the effect, first, that courage is human character's prime essential, without which no rightness ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... estates, and the means thereof. An argument fit for great and mighty princes to have in their hand; to the end that neither by over-measuring their forces, they leese themselves in vain enterprises; nor on the other side, by undervaluing them, they descend to fearful and pusillanimous counsels. ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... Latin, English, and the Hibernian Vernacular, with an inceptive Initiation into the Rudiments of Greek, as far as the Gospel of St. John the Divine; attended with copious Disquisitions on the relative Merits of moral and physical Philosophy, as contrasted with the pusillanimous Lectures of that Ignoramus of the first Water, Phadrick M'Swagger, falsely calling himself Philomath—cum multis aliis quos ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... Dr. Ryerson had strenuously opposed any reference of the questions to the British Parliament as a pusillanimous, and yet an interested, party abnegation of Canadian rights. He, therefore, prepared and circulated extensively a petition to the House of Assembly on this and kindred subjects. This proceeding called forth a counter petition, urging the Legislature to recognize the principle of an ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... was as brave as Robespierre was pusillanimous, repressed the smile of disdain that quivered on his lips a moment, and left ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... were a generation of slaves, suddenly made freemen. They permitted themselves to be shot because they had been educated to bare their backs at the command of the white oligarch. But that sort of pusillanimous cowardice cannot be expected to last always. Men in a state of freedom instinctively question the right of others to impose unequal burdens upon them, or to deny to them equal and exact protection of the ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... 'Sir' as if I were addressing one of a totally unkindred clay, one of the drossy children of earth, with whom I have no relationship and feel I could never have any familiarity. Have you ever felt that the presence of a man without feeling made you a fool? I am always dumb, or pusillanimous or (if I speak) ridiculous, in the company of such a person. I love a reasoner, and do not by any means wish to be flashing lightning, cloud-riding, or playing with stars. But a marble-hearted companion, who, if you should by chance ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... awaited warlike Menelaus? Then shouldst thou have known of how brave a man thou dost possess the blooming spouse. Nor will thy harp, and the gifts of Venus, and thy hair, and thy figure avail thee, when thou shalt be mingled with the dust.[147] But the Trojans are very pusillanimous; else wouldst thou have been arrayed in a garment of stone, on account of the evils which ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... call me forward more powerfully than a poor, regardless, and unprofitable sin of curiosity should be able to withhold me; whereby a man cuts himself off from all action, and becomes the most helpless, pusillanimous, and unweaponed creature in the world, the most unfit and unable to do that which all mortals most aspire to—either to be useful to his friends or to offend his enemies? Or, if it be to be thought a natural proneness, there is against that a much more potent inclination ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... towards mankind; we being all, in order to the maintenance of society, by an implicit compact, obliged by speech to declare our mind, to inform truly, and not to impose upon our neighbour; arguing pusillanimous timorousness and impotency of mind, a distrust in God's help, and diffidence in all good means to compass our designs; begetting deception and error, a foul and ill-favoured brood: lying, I say, is ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... shouting, women shrieking and children crying, all in a tangled mass of noisy humanity. Some of the men brandished sticks, shovels or rakes, any instrument they had happened to possess; they shouted loudly for the Caesar, demanding his death, urging the more pusillanimous to rush the palace and drag the hiding princeps out into the open. Others carried tall poles on which they had improvised rude banners made of bits of purple-coloured rags: they were proclaiming the new Caesar of their choice in voices ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... by the glorious Constitution of our Union! Such a condescension would damn an honest man, would put modesty to the blush. What! to engage in a contest with you? a rogue, a damnable thief, a negro thief, an outbreaker, a criminal in the sight of all honest men; ... the mother, too, of a pusillanimous son, who permitted me to curse and damn you in Sylvania! I would rather be caught with another man's sheep on my back than to engage in such a subject, and with such an individual as old Laura ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... himself grand prince, and Vassali in vain endeavored to move the compassion of his captor by tears. The uncle, however, so far had pity for his vanquished nephew as to appoint him to the governorship of the city of Kolomna. This seemed perfectly to satisfy the pusillanimous young man, and, after partaking of a splendid feast with his uncle, he departed, rejoicing, from the capital where he had been enthroned, to the provincial ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her desolation, took the child Demophoon to nurture him as her own on the food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of bodily needs hold the artist back ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... which I remember: "There are some who declare that Canada's trade is declining; there are some who maintain that the rich glow of health which at present mantles o'er Canada's virgin cheek will soon be replaced by the pallid hues of the corpse. To such pusillanimous propagandists of a preposterous pessimism, I answer, Mr. Speaker with all confidence, never! never!" As a rhetorical effort this is striking, though there seems a lack of ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... of the house of David might protect them from the suspicions of a tyrant, the present greatness of his own family alarmed the pusillanimous temper of Domitian, which could only be appeased by the blood of those Romans whom he either feared, or hated, or esteemed. Of the two sons of his uncle Flavius Sabinus, the elder was soon convicted of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... operation of "sticking up" without a word, but with revived interest in life. He noted the pusillanimous pallor of the driver and his friend, and felt personally indebted to the desperado who had put a stop to their unpleasant conversation. The inside passenger made a yet more obsequious surrender. Not that the trio were ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... ethereal, most divine, Will escape from my hands forever and ever. But the other is already mine! Let him live to corrupt his race, Breathing among them, with every breath, Weakness, selfishness, and the base And pusillanimous fear of death. I know his nature, and I know That of all who in my ministry Wander the great earth to and fro, And on my errands come and go, The safest and subtlest are ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... little black eddies—the same water that had flowed along under the willows past Eynsham, past Oxford, under the church at Clifton, past Moulsford, past Sonning. And he thought: 'My God! To have her to myself one day on the river—one whole long day!' Why had he been so pusillanimous all this time? He passed his hand over his face. Broad faces do not easily grow thin, but his felt thin to him, and this gave him a kind of morbid satisfaction. If she knew how he was longing, how he suffered! He turned away, toward Whitehall. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... respect I can not but interpret as you have done the declaration of your government. They must know that the strict performance of treaties is the best and safest policy; they must know that good faith alone can inspire respectability to a nation; that a pusillanimous conduct provokes insult, and brings upon a country those very dangers which it ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... pusillanimous Spoiled children most degenerate And tiresome rogues ridiculous And stupid censors passionate; Amid coquettes who pray to God And abject slaves who kiss the rod; In haunts of fashion where each day All with urbanity betray, Where ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... feminine beauty, esthetics beauty, pulchritude beautify, embellish poison, venom vote, franchise vote, suffrage taste, gust tasteful, gustatory tasteless, insipid flower, floral count, compute cowardly, pusillanimous tent, pavilion money, finance monetary, pecuniary trace, vestige face, countenance turn, revolve bottle, vial grease, lubricant oily, unctuous revive, resuscitate faultless, impeccable scourge, flagellate power, puissance barber, tonsorial bishop, episcopal carry, portable fruitful, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... He had no pusillanimous notion of the unworthiness of revenge. He believed retaliation, when complete and inflicted without cost or injury to the giver, to be a most logical and fitting thing. But he knew that revenge is a two-edged weapon, and that it must be wielded ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the postponement of moral to material interests. There is no prosperity so great as courage. We do not believe that any amount of forbearance would have conciliated the South so long as they thought us pusillanimous. The only way to retain the Border States was by showing that we had the will and the power to do without them. ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... to maturity under the government of Charles and James, first made themselves severely felt under the government of William. For Charles and James were content to be the vassals and pensioners of a powerful and ambitious neighbour: they submitted to his ascendency: they shunned with pusillanimous caution whatever could give him offence; and thus, at the cost of the independence and dignity of that ancient and glorious crown which they unworthily wore, they avoided a conflict which would instantly have shown how helpless, under their ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the fire that now seemed inevitable. The troops moved across the street, and faced toward the Bowery, obeying the word of command promptly, and marching with great steadiness, although the pelting they received was murderous. To retreat would be pusillanimous, to stand there and be pelted to death worse still; and General Hall finally gave the order to fire point blank, but to aim low, so that men would be wounded, rather than killed. The command fell clear ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... to the land owner, incapable of understanding the ideal of natural right and the contexture of parliamentary government, a Christian of merely external routine and formalist liturgy, he excited in the pusillanimous Frederick William, in his earliest counsels and during his early influence in the crisis of '48, a horror of democratic principles and progressist schools which led him to salute the corpses of his ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... unfolds in a striking light the circumstances under which Schiller stood at present; and may serve to justify the violence of his alarms, which to the happy natives of our Island might otherwise appear pusillanimous and excessive. For these reasons we subjoin ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... with calfless legs and stooping shoulders, weak in body and mind, inert, pusillanimous and stupid, whose premature wrinkles and furtive glance, tell of misery and degradation? That is an English peasant or pauper, for the words are synonymous. His sire was a pauper, and his mother's milk wanted nourishment. From infancy ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... carping criticism," says Magoon, "are usually the product of obtuse sensibilities and a pusillanimous will. Plutarch tells us of an idle and effeminate Etrurian, who found fault with the manner in which Themistocles had conducted a recent campaign. 'What,' said the hero, in reply, 'have you, too, something to say about war, who are like the fish that has a sword, but no heart?' ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... deserved this treatment?" Observe, my Lords, he had met with no treatment, if treatment it may be called, from us, of the kind of which he complains. The Court of Directors had, however, in a way shameful, abject, low, and pusillanimous, begged of him, as if they were his dependants, and not his masters, to give them some light into the account; they desire a receiver of money to tell from whom he received it, and how he applied it. He answers, They may be hanged for a parcel ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... descending to the plain, and when we had got half-way across it, I scoured the hills all round with my telescope to see if I could discern traces of our pusillanimous foes. ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... nothing but rocks and sand, and the Supreme Brahma cursed them to the lowest hell. Then Adami spoke—and it showed him to be every inch a man—"Curse me, but curse not her; it was not her fault, it was mine." (Our Adam says, with a pusillanimous whine,—Curse her, for it is her fault: she tempted me and I did eat!" The world, today, is teeming with just such cowards!) Then said Brahma, "I will save her, but not thee." And then spoke his wife, out of the fullness of the love of a ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... stayed over a night to make a connection, and was leaning idly against one of the pillars of the Stonewall Hotel when she passed by. He remained in town four days. She thought she loved him—lavished on him that first hysteria of passion that would have gone to the pusillanimous clerk. The naval officer's uniform—there were few of them in those days—had made the magic. He left with vague promises on his lips, and, once on the train, rejoiced that he had not told her ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... any kind be properly pardoned till we have it in our power to punish them? To pretend to pardon, while we are labouring under the pain or dishonour of them, will be thought by some to be but the vaunted mercy of a pusillanimous heart, trembling to resent them. The remedy I propose is a severe one: But what pain can be more severe than the injury? Or how will injuries be believed to grieve us, that are never ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... the door until something better might present itself, she resolved to accept the terms of the straw manufacturer, and entered upon her duties. For a week or two the sum earned by the unfortunate lady was faithfully paid her, but on the third week the pusillanimous nature of the Jew cropped out. She had bargained to manufacture straw hats at eighty cents a dozen, or six and two-third cents each. At this rate, she managed to earn two dollars and fifty cents per week. Upon applying for her wages at the close of the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... it. He had considered that Mr Harding was bound to withstand the popular clamour with which he was attacked for receiving so large an income as eight hundred a year from such a charity, and was not even satisfied that his father-in-law's conduct had not been pusillanimous and undignified. He looked also on this reduction of the warden's income as a paltry scheme on the part of government for escaping from a difficulty into which it had been brought by the public ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... philosophy of Greek and Italian history before I have justified myself to my benefactors? How dare I read Washington's campaigns when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbors. It is peeping. ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... triumphs, and of whose valour several authors, especially Cicero and Paterculus, have formed such elogiums; this very Pompey left the battle of Pharsalia before he had lost it, and retreated to his tent, where he sat like the most pusillanimous rascal in a fit of despair, and yielded a victory, which was to determine the empire of the world, to Caesar. I am not much travelled in the history of modern times, that is to say, these last thousand ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... was one of those old fogies who could not appreciate manliness in a boy. He demanded abject servility and pusillanimous crouching on the part of an offender. When he frowned, the boy ought to wither with fear rather than with the consciousness of guilt. McDougal had thrown himself into a becoming attitude, in his estimation; had groaned, trembled, and cringed. ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... that damnable English spy was actually in his power, the man was a pusillanimous fool to allow the rich prize to slip from his grasp! Chauvelin felt as if he were choking; his slender fingers worked nervily around his cravat; beads of perspiration trickled unheeded down his ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... playthings, in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle jeers. At the same time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of life; all people give them up out of the same pusillanimous respect for those who are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bugaboos, stalking through the brain of dull thoughtless pusillanimous mankind, do, to a terrible extent, tumble hither and thither, and cause to lurch from side to side, their ship of state, and all that is embarked there, BREAKFAST-TABLE, among other things. Nevertheless, if they were only bugaboos, and mere ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... The profligate and pusillanimous John is well known to have exposed his own rights, and the liberties of his people, to all the evils of protracted civil wars, and foreign invasion. At the period of his decease, the capital and the southern counties were in the hands of ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... committee of inquiry. 'It has been represented to me,' he said, 'by the colonies and by persons in this country who are interested in them, that the course which I am proposing is not consistent with the necessities of the case; that there is something pusillanimous in the motion which I am going to make; that in point of fact the interests connected with sugar and coffee planting are in extremis; and that while the question of their redress is being discussed in a committee above-stairs, these great interests will ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless, pusillanimous industry. But when his strained attention was presently rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood erect but for the slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter of temperament than of age, one saw a tall man of massive build, whose keen glance ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... occasions her remonstrances were disregarded, and courses were pursued to which she strongly objected. The surrender after Majuba was in her opinion a pusillanimous abandonment of the English flag, and it was with extreme reluctance that she acquiesced in it. Still more vehement were her feelings about the long abandonment of General Gordon in the Soudan. She had been indefatigable in ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... pious"—so do those apostates confess; and some of them are still too pusillanimous ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... could not be stretched in law to such a sentence. It was resolved therefore, to sacrifice him to the resentment of Spain, in a manner so shameful, that it has justly exposed the conduct of the court to the indignation of all succeeding ages, and transmitted the pusillanimous monarch with infamy to posterity. They called him down to judgment upon his former sentence passed fifteen years before, which they were not then ashamed to execute. A privy seal was sent to the judges ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... But confronted with serious obstacles, he flinched from his task, and therein, to my thinking, lay his weakness. If he had come prepared to assert his personal responsibility, to unfold his scheme, to have it amply and publicly discussed, to reject pusillanimous compromise in the sphere of execution, and to appeal to the peoples of the world to help him to carry it out, the last phase of his policy would have been worthy of the first, and might conceivably have inaugurated ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... which at first sight seems very extraordinary, viz, that surprize is apt to change into fear, and every thing that is unexpected affrights us. The most obvious conclusion from this is, that human nature is in general pusillanimous; since upon the sudden appearance of any object. we immediately conclude it to be an evil, and without waiting till we can examine its nature, whether it be good or bad, are at first affected with fear. This I say is the most obvious conclusion; but upon ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... one, each buried up to the ears in folios, she would give vent to an irritable cough and retire discomfited. In reality Elsmere was thinking of nothing in the world but what Catherine Leyburn might be doing that morning. Judging a North countrywoman by the pusillanimous Southern standard, he found himself glorying in the weather. She could not wander ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... three ways. First, in itself; and thus it is evident that by its very nature it is opposed to magnanimity, from which it differs as great and little differ in connection with the same subject. For just as the magnanimous man tends to great things out of greatness of soul, so the pusillanimous man shrinks from great things out of littleness of soul. Secondly, it may be considered in reference to its cause, which on the part of the intellect is ignorance of one's own qualification, and on the part of the appetite is the fear of failure in what one ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... make a book, but that, whereof they may be in doubt, he cannot make one. A president, where I was, boasted that he had amassed together two hundred and odd commonplaces in one of his judgments; in telling which, he deprived himself of the glory he had got by it: in my opinion, a pusillanimous and absurd vanity for such a subject and such a person. I do the contrary; and amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service; at the hazard of having it said that 'tis for want ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... question must not be hastily or dogmatically given. The arbitrary rejection of any theory that may be offered, without a fair and candid examination, will leave our minds in uncertainty and doubt as to the validity of our own position. A blind faith is only one remove from a pusillanimous skepticism. We can not render our own position secure except by comprehending, assaulting, and capturing the position of our foe. It is, therefore, due to ourselves and to the cause of truth, that we shall examine the evidence upon ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... a very general, or I might say almost universal, reprobation. Some blamed the proposed deed because it was barbarous and a foul example to set before a race half barbarous itself; others because it was illegal; others again because, in the face of so weak an enemy, it appeared pitifully pusillanimous; almost all because it tended to precipitate and embitter war. In the midst of the turmoil he had raised, and under the immediate pressure of certain indignant white residents, the baron fell back upon a new expedient, certainly less barbarous, perhaps no more legal; and on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... though it would have been better to fight ten battles than to give up one of them, still a set of flatterers harassed our pusillanimous emperor with harping on the dreaded name of Procopius, and affirmed that unless we quickly recrossed the river, that chieftain, as soon as he heard of the death of Julian, would easily bring about a revolution which no one could resist, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... other nations had, up to this time, been in the habit of fishing in English waters, but, though the pusillanimous king would not, of his own accord, have interfered for fear of giving offence, so great an outcry was raised by the people, that he was compelled to issue a proclamation prohibiting any foreigners from fishing on the British coast. Though in terms it appeared general, it was in reality levelled ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... later, surrendered. Ferdinand, having sworn to maintain the fueros, was thereupon acknowledged as sovereign. However, it was only in 1516 that the former rulers were expelled from Navarrese territory. "Had I been Don Juan and you Donna Catherine," said the Queen to her pusillanimous husband, as they crossed the Pyrenees, "we should not have lost our kingdom." From this time forward the d'Albrets, like their successors the Bourbons, were sovereigns of Navarre in name only, for an attempt ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... of voices told us my two anglers were approaching, and with Rebecca's quieting hand on the pusillanimous Robelia we drew into hiding and saw them cross the corner of a clearing and vanish again downstream. Then, hearing the coach, we went ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... education and development and that they were seeking to set themselves right in order to maintain their prestige. Add to this the persistent and systematic effort made to destroy every scrap of record relating to the man—the sole gleam of shame evidenced in the impolitic, idiotic, and pusillanimous treatment of him—and the whole question becomes such a puzzle that it may just as well be left in darkness, with a throb of pity for the unfortunate victim caught in such a maelstrom of panic-stricken passion ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... House of the Four Chimneys." Hither he transferred many of the precious reliques of New-Amsterdam; the great round-crowned hat that once covered the capacious head of Walter the Doubter, and the identical shoe with which Peter the Headstrong kicked his pusillanimous councillors down-stairs. St. Nicholas, it is said, took this loyal house under his especial protection; and a Dutch soothsayer predicted, that as long as it should stand, Communipaw would be safe from the intrusion ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... may be all very well in its recollection fifty years after. But the impression of the moment was, we presume, not quite so favourable. The inevitable consequence of this habit was to spoil both master and scholars. It made the timid boy pusillanimous, while it made the fierce more indignant and resentful. What could be the feelings of the master who could inflict almost agony on seventeen mere children, let the offence be what it might? Yet the offence was trifling; troublesome behaviour to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... be done. Even, on her behalf, if she were true to him, something must be done. Was it not pusillanimous in him to make no attempt to see his love and to tell her that he at any rate was true to her? These people, who were now his enemies, the lawyers and the Lovels, with the Countess at the head of them, had used him like a dog, had repudiated him without remorse, had not a word even ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... Mozart could not convince his pusillanimous father that he did not owe an apology to the Archbishop for being kicked. But he was so deeply offended that he never returned to Salzburg. So much for those who cherish the pathetic belief that the days of patrons were of benefit to the artist ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... law, and to those who are placed in authority over us, while in the legitimate exercise of their functions—we submit to the decrees of Providence, because they are not to be resisted—a coward submits to be insulted—a pusillanimous wretch to be despised—and a knave, if detected, must submit to be scouted—a slave submits to his Taskmaster; but, the Freeholders of Westmoreland, cannot, in reason, be said to submit to the House of Lowther naming ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... send a very satisfactory answer to your health inquiries, as far as regards myself. The mean, pusillanimous fever which took under-hold of me two months ago is still THERE, as impregnably fixed as a cockle-burr in a sheep's tail. I have tried idleness, but (naturally) it won't WORK. I do no labor except works of necessity — such as kissing Mary, who is a more ravishing angel than ever ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... The foundation of success was the separate negotiation with England, and here there had stood in the way a more formidable obstacle than the mere reluctance of Franklin. The chevalier Luzerne and his secretary Marbois had been busy with Congress, and that body had sent well-meant but silly and pusillanimous instructions to its commissioners at Paris to be guided in all things by the wishes of the French court. To disregard such instructions required all the lofty courage for which Jay and Adams were ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... gallows' rope as a mere vision of some terrified mind; at least, if he had any doubts on that subject—and reports of the fiery temper of the king might have roused his suspicions—he conceived that a bold bearing would do him more good than a pusillanimous demeanour; and, as for flight, he despised it, as well as disapproved of it, on grounds of fancied prudence, seeing that he would thereby admit his guilt, and prove his pusillanimity, while it might ultimately ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... and gestures of this man left me drained of all courage. Surely, on no other occasion should I have been thus pusillanimous. My state I regarded as a hopeless one. I was wholly at the mercy of this being. Whichever way I turned my eyes, I saw no avenue by which I might escape. The resources of my personal strength, my ingenuity, and my eloquence, ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... the theatrical registrar, had a dog named Bob, and a sagacious dog he was; but he was a pusillanimous dog, in a word, an arrant coward, and above all things he dreaded the fire of a gun. His master having taken him once to the enclosed part of Hyde Park next to Kensington Gardens, when the guards were exercising, their first fire so alarmed Bob that he scampered off, and never after could ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... (Extreme Left): I would earnestly warn you against such pusillanimous sentimentality, which would not win over the foes of the new order, but would only supply them with the means of attacking it, or shall we say allow them to retain those means. If we would exercise ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Littleton, he perceived that he was not free to retire from the market on the profits of friendly regard unless he was prepared to fly in the face of advice and buy in his two hundred Reading railroad. To do so would be pusillanimous; moreover to retire and abstain from further dealings would make Williams' two cheques more obviously a charitable donation, and the thought of them was becoming galling. Above all there were Selma's feelings to be considered. The ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... by no means the perfect hero his American admirers would have the world believe. His great value at Ticonderoga was his professional knowledge and his ardour in the cause he had espoused. His presence 'changed the spirit of the camp.' It sadly needed change. 'Such a set of pusillanimous wretches never were collected' is his own description in a despairing letter to his wife. The 'army,' in fact, was all parts and no whole, and all the parts were mere untrained militia. Moreover, the spirit of the 'town meeting' ruled the camp. Even a battery could not be moved without ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... And it will seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her just expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:—for it was only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of espousing. The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of putting themselves in the right to themselves. The love she bore him, because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... force within the body politic as well as in religion. Ulster was 'planted' with Englishmen and Lowland Scots. In the midst of all these changes the great Queen, grown old and very lonely, died in 1603; and with her ended the glorious Tudor dynasty of England. James, pusillanimous and pedantic son of Darnley and Mary Queen of Scots, ascended the throne as the first of the sinister Stuarts, and, truckling to vindictive Spain, threw Raleigh into prison ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... without stubborn resistance, and this is one reason why shyness is often so conspicuous, seeming deliberately to court an avoidable confusion. Over and over again it forces the recalcitrant body back into the arena, preferring repeated humiliation to a pusillanimous surrender. People often wonder at the recklessness with which the shy expose themselves to disaster, forgetting that in this insistence of a soul under discomfiture, there is evidence of a moral strength which ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... integrity. The South claims, little as we can understand it, the same ground for rising against the land they had sworn to protect, and whose fathers died with our fathers to create. We at the North would have been pusillanimous and weak indeed had we silently submitted to that which is in our view against every principle of national right and renown. To have acted otherwise would have been to bring down upon our heads the scorn and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was to succeed him upon the throne, was then in Poland. Catharine was glad to have the pusillanimous Charles out of the way. He was sufficiently depraved to commit any crime, without being sufficiently resolute to brave its penalty. Henry III. had, in early life, displayed great vigor of character. At the age of fifteen he had been placed in ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... bodily hurt to be done or to be procured to be done to him by H. Fielding and his man. Mr A. Tucker feared that the man would beat, maim, or kill him." No words could more aptly sum up this delightful story than those of Mr Austin Dobson: "a charming girl, who is also an heiress; a pusillanimous guardian, with ulterior views of his own; a handsome and high-spirited young suitor; a faithful attendant ready to 'beat, maim or kill' on his master's behalf; a frustrated elopement and a compulsory visit ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... firing on Fort Sumter, yet no public notice was taken thereof; and when, months afterward, I came North, I found not one single sign of preparation. It was for this reason, somewhat, that the people of the South became convinced that those of the North were pusillanimous and cowardly, and the Southern leaders were thereby enabled to commit their people to the war, nominally in defense of their slave property. Up to the hour of the firing on Fort Sumter, in April, 1861, it does seem to me that our public men, our politicians, were blamable for not ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... last one, is concerned with war. War brings to every man not incapacitated by age or physical defects the call of his country to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It also exposes to view the few pusillanimous young men who are satisfied to enjoy protection from the horrors of invasion and the priceless boon of personal freedom, secured to them by the self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they themselves remain snugly at home and talk of ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... preparations against the hostilities of his northern neighbor. When in this situation, he received intelligence of the treaty secretly concluded between John and Philip; and though uneasy at this concurrence of a French and Scottish war he resolved not to encourage his enemies by a pusillanimous behavior, or by yielding ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... abandon what she bravely sought, Deserves at least applause for her attempt, And pity for her loss. But that's a cause Not often unsuccessful; power usurped Is weakness when opposed; conscious of wrong, 'Tis pusillanimous and prone to flight. But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought Of freedom, in that hope itself possess All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength, The scorn of danger, and united hearts, The surest presage of the good they ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... essentially Royalist, and all resistance would be over in a day or two, till the whole ruin burst on him at once, when he became like a man awakened from a dream, utterly confounded with the magnitude of the calamity and as pusillanimous and miserable as he had before been blind and confident. It must be owned that their end has been worthy of the rest, for not one of them has evinced good feeling, or magnanimity, or courage in their fall, nor excited the least sympathy or commiseration. The Duke of Fitzjames ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... shrewdness made him the first Duke of Marlborough, and last, I regret to chronicle, was George Hamilton, resting from his labors at self-reform. Soon after dark another congenial spirit, the most pusillanimous of them all, young William Wentworth, Sir William's son and Roger's nephew, entered the taproom dripping with rain. Before going to the fire, he called Crofts and Berkeley to one side. Placing his arms about their necks, he drew their faces close to his and made the following remarkable ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... punishment; and with an iteration that was not superfluous in his own day, he denounces its cruel and demoralising effects. It saps the character where it is really believed, and renders the mind which receives it servile and pusillanimous. The case is no better when it is neither sincerely believed nor boldly rejected. Such an attitude, which is, he thinks, that of most professing believers, makes for insincerity, and for an indifference to all honest thought and speculation. The man who dare neither ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... economy, he had made up his losses. His turning the screw during those relatively impecunious years represents, I am pretty sure, the only act of resolution of his life. It was rendered possible by his morbid, his actually pusillanimous dread of poverty; he doesn't feel safe without half a million between him and starvation. Meanwhile he had turned from a young man into an old man; his health was broken, his spirit was jaded, and I imagine, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... whole speech was violent, threatening and haughty, although he carefully abstained from any personal allusions to myself and even avoided calling me by name. His declamation over, I stepped out, thinking it unbecoming and pusillanimous not to neutralize an address, that might do so much injury, especially because I could perceive by their smothered sighs, and read in the paleness of their faces the strong impression it had made on ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... Borghoo. The former are perpetually engaged in trading with each other from town to town, the latter never quit their towns except in case of war, or when engaged in predatory excursions; the former are pusillanimous and cowardly, the latter are bold and courageous, full of spirit and energy, and never seem happier than when engaged in martial exercises; the former are generally mild, unassuming, humble and honest, but cold and passionless. The latter are proud and haughty, too vain to be civil, and too ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... those of Natal and the Cape. But he reckoned without his host, and all that he had taken the trouble to do was ultimately undone. In 1852 the Government at home declared its policy to be the ultimate abandonment of the Orange River Sovereignty. For this pusillanimous policy there were several reasons, the greatest being a fear of a Basuto rising and the trouble it would entail. The British Government therefore decided to maintain its rights over the Transvaal no further, and ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... afterwards that the powerful family then at the helm did not condescend to do so, he somewhat ignominiously took off his mourning in a hurry. All these, and numerous similar petty instances of timorousness, may appear to us at a remote distance trifling and pusillanimous, as do also many of the model personal characteristics and goody-goody private actions of the sage; but if we make due allowance for the difficulty of translating strange notions into a strange tongue, and for the natural absence of ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... out of the cubicle and Edwin had a dreadful moment introducing her to Darius and explaining their purpose. Why had he not prepared the ground in advance? His pusillanimous cowardice again! However, the directing finger of God sent a customer into the shop, and Edwin escaped with his Hilda through the ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... for Captain Lennox (who, in pusillanimous fashion, had loved and sailed away, rather than stop and help the woman he had compromised) cut short his learned friend's tearful eloquence by admitting that he was prepared to accept a verdict, with L1000 damages. As the judge agreed, the case ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... could have been more untimely than this fresh judicial excursion into the field of "manners and morals," and partisan malice was naturally alert to interpret it as something even more offensive. The report soon came from Baltimore that Chase had deliberately assailed the Administration as "weak, pusillanimous, relaxed," and governed by the sole desire of continuing "in unfairly acquired power." But even before this intelligence arrived, Jefferson had decided that the opportunity afforded by Chase's outburst ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... mostly did, forwards and upwards at another. There was no sense of support afforded by the touch of comrades, and the being an item of a serried mass, as in the case of the majority of the battles of the Soudan, fought in square formation. Then there might be unsteady or pusillanimous soldiers, whose faults were hidden by their firmer comrades, from whose presence and example they gained confidence; but at Kirbekan every soldier fought on his own account, as it were, and failure in courage or dash in any individual ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... marvel that men did not go mad under this horrible stress of apprehension. Apparently there was no hope. The old New England spite and prejudice against General Schuyler had stirred up now a fierce chorus of calumny and attack. He was blamed for St. Clair's pusillanimous retreat, for Congressional languor, for the failure of the militia to come forward—for everything, in fact. His hands were tied by suspicion, by treason, by popular lethargy, by lack of money, men, and means. ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... see for myself!" he repeated, as he led the way out to the veranda. "I'll see what goblin scared my pusillanimous staff ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... conventicle of every Christian meeting. But I am certain that a State governed by the rules of justice and fortitude, or a Church built and founded upon the rock of faith and true knowledge, cannot be so pusillanimous. While things are yet not constituted in religion, that freedom of writing should be restrained by a discipline imitated from the prelates and learnt by them from the Inquisition, to shut us up all again into the breast of a licenser, must needs give ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... on the left, the Kralahome's half-brother; for it was he, and no other, who had committed this most cowardly act of revenge. The expression of Mr. Hunter's face, as the truth slowly dawned upon him, was rich in its blending of indignation, disgust, and contempt. "The pusillanimous rascal!" he exclaimed, as he hurried ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... species of confederation has been the cause which has brought all Unions to Civil War, to subjection, or to a stagnant apathy, and the peoples which formed these leagues have been either too dull to discern, or too pusillanimous to apply this great remedy. The American Confederation perished ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... mother of a slothful and pusillanimous people, is a neighbor island, anciently subjected by the arms of Oceana; since almost depopulated for shaking the yoke, and at length replanted with a new race. But, through what virtues of the soil ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... If he have not the justice to put down his own selfishness at every turn, the courage to stand by the dangerous true at every turn, how shall he know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small; for the uses of the day merely. But does not the very Fox know something of Nature? Exactly so: it knows where the geese lodge! The human Reynard, very frequent everywhere in the world, what more does he ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.) |
