"Murrain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indigestion, dyspepsia; decay &c (deterioration) 659; decline, consumption, palsy, paralysis, prostration. taint, pollution, infection, sepsis, septicity^, infestation; epidemic, pandemic, endemic, epizootic; murrain, plague, pestilence, pox. sore, ulcer, abscess, fester, boil; pimple, wen &c (swelling) 250; carbuncle, gathering, imposthume^, peccant humor, issue; rot, canker, cold sore, fever sore; cancer, carcinoma, leukemia, neoplastic disease, malignancy, tumor; caries, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... "How now! what, a murrain on you, puppy! Am I to be told my duty by a raw-boned, ill-conditioned Irish gallowglass that I have fed at my table and spent half my life in making a gentleman of? What do you think of that, Sir Captain? How would you like to be saddled with a young ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... and quite dead to all but the paltriest considerations. I accept the issue. We can only know others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellow-men, or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the chief is checked by that of the priest. A supposed skill in medicine, imaginary arts of divination, and an accredited power over the elements are the prerogatives of certain witches and wizards. Thus, when a murrain among the cattle, or the death of an important individual has taken place, the blame is laid upon some unfortunate victim whom the witch or wizard points out. And the ordeal to which he must submit, is equal in cruelty to those of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... of the Emperor, and the ruin of his loyal city of Sicca, and I have been interrupted in the discharge of my duty—I, a constable of the place. See whether Calphurnius will not bring again upon us the plague, the murrain, the locusts, and all manner of larvae and maniae before the ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... was young and wore roses then, the days passed slowly to Zipporah and she grew tired of Moses and the Lord, tired of the rod that turned into a serpent, of the strife and the bondage and the river of blood; tired of the frogs and the lice and the swarms of flies; disgusted with the murrain of beasts and the boils and terrified at the thunder and fire and rain of hail and all the horrors of Egypt, and like the woman of to-day, when things get too awfully unpleasant, she made it uncomfortable for Moses, ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... to see that you have not worked with your hands or you would not need to ask. When half the folk in the country were dead it was then that the other half could pick and choose who they would work for, and for what wage. That is why I say that the murrain was the best friend that ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... such a pretty uneasiness, I warrant you, and then recovered herself from one eye to another, until she was perfectly confused by meeting something so wistful in all she encountered, that at last, with a murrain to her, she cast her bewitching eye upon me. I no sooner met it but I bowed like a great surprized booby; and knowing her cause was to be the first which came on, I cried, like a great captivated calf as I was, 'Make way for the defendant's witnesses.' ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... that never runs so thin The milk as when it leaves the milkman's tin; That every link the sausageman prepares Harbours some wandering Towser unawares. And Binns, the baker (whom a murrain seize!), Immune from fraud's accustomed penalties, Sells me a stuff compound of string and lead, And has the nerve to name the substance bread. But deafer far to the voice of conscience grown The type that cuts me off a pound of bone Wherefrom an ounce of fat forlornly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... persecution of this very year, hated him with a deadly hatred. His French alliances, his declaration of war with the Emperor, hindered the trade with Flanders and secured the hostility of the merchant class. The country at large, galled with murrain and famine and panic-struck by an outbreak of the sweating sickness which carried off two thousand in London alone, laid all its suffering at the door of the Cardinal. And now that Henry's mood itself became uncertain Wolsey knew his hour was come. Were the marriage once made, he told ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... "A murrain on your youth," cried Adrian, testily. "However, since there 's no quieting you otherwise, I suppose, for the sake of peace, I 'd best tell you, and have done with it. Well, then,"—he stood off, to watch the effect of ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... hopeless. 140 They must not only mend but draw it too. The mules are drowned—a murrain on them both! One kicked me as I would ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... and to draw buyers proclaimed the virtues of it. Nothing ever thrived on it, saith he. No owner of it ever died in his bed; some hung, some drowned themselves; some were banished, some starved; the trees were all blasted; the swine died of the measles, the cattle of the murrain, the sheep of the rot; they that stood were ragged, bare, and bald as your hand; nothing was ever reared there, not a duckling, or a goose. Hospitium fuerat calamitatis. {34a} Was not this man like to ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get well, unpoisoned. These dumb cattle would not learn it of themselves, and so the murrain ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... have parted with the colt, and have only got a gross of green spectacles, with copper rims and shagreen cases! A murrain take such trumpery! The blockhead has been imposed upon, and should ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... shall moisten his lips, but not wet his palate. Him also some one, enjoying both [parents],[718] shall push away from the banquet, striking him with his hands, and reviling him with reproaches: 'A murrain on thee! even thy father feasts not with us.' Then shall the boy Astyanax return weeping to his widowed mother,—he who formerly, indeed, upon the knees of his own father, ate marrow alone, and the rich fat of sheep; but when sleep came upon him, and he ceased childishly crying, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... this forc'd Fire each Family is supplied with new Fire, which is no sooner kindled than a pot full of water is quickly set on it, and afterwards sprinkled upon the people infected with the Plague, or upon cattle that have the Murrain. And this, they all say, they find successful by experience.'—Description of the Western Islands of ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... late Perplexed me; now the riddle reads itself. A proper man, a very proper man! A fellow that burns Trinidado leaf And sends smoke through his nostril like a flue! A fop, a hanger-on of willing skirts— A murrain on him! Would Elizabeth In some mad freak had clapped him in the Tower— Ay, through the Traitor's Gate. Would he were dead. Within the year what worthy men have died, Persons of substance, civic ornaments, And here 's this gilt court-butterfly on wing! ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... period, that a sort of murrain fell upon the London publishers. After the failure of Constable at Edinburgh, they came down one after another, like a pack of cards. Authors are not the only people who lose labour and money by publishers; there are also ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... flower from the bunch and putting it into his coat.] Yes, and how to brew tea as'll curl up anyone's tongue within the mouth for a year—and fancy drinks for sheep with foot rot, and powders against the murrain and any other ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin
... found. With the species of Peronospora it is different, for these are truly parasitic on living plants, and, as far as already known, the species are confined to certain special plants, and cannot be made to vegetate on any other. The species which causes the potato murrain, although liable to attack the tomato, and other species of Solanaceae, does not extend its ravages beyond that natural order, whilst Peronospora parasitica confines itself to cruciferous plants. One species is ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... on his journey upon the King's business, in March 1349, he can scarcely have turned his back upon his diocese without some misgivings as to what might happen during his absence. In some parts of Norfolk a very grievous murrain had prevailed during the previous year among the live stock in the farms, and though this had almost disappeared, there was ample room for anxiety in the outlook. If the plague had not yet been felt to any extent ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... its height in the closing years of the century, anything, however trivial, would arouse suspicion. A cow would go dry, or a colt break its leg, or there would be a drought, or a storm, or a murrain on the cattle or a mildew on the crops. Or else a physician, baffled by some disease that did not yield to his treatment of bleeding and to his doses of garlic and horses' dung, would suggest that witchcraft ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... was very tall and rude, and his grey hair hung loose on his shoulders, and his dress was still a hunter's. They had not long remembered the time when a grievous disease, like a plague, fell upon the place, and people died by scores, as sheep fall in a murrain. And again they had turned to him, and he, because he knew of a miraculous medicine got from Indian sachems, whose people had suffered of this sickness, came into the little city, and by his medicines and fearless love and kindness ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... quietly for a few minutes, he whispered, "Monsieur, make the door fast. Now, hand me my doublet. A murrain on the knaves who brought me to this! A knife, monsieur, and slit the lining. Do you feel a packet? 'Tis a small one. Ah, that is it. Look, ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... it was a wretched business, nothing but paying lock-dues, bumping against schuyts, and towing down stinking canals. Never a peaceful night like this—always moored by some quay or tow-path, with people passing and boys. Heavens! shall I ever forget those boys! A perfect murrain of them infests Holland; they seem to have nothing in the world to do but throw stones ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Hamilton. "You might as well talk of keeping on the good side of the American traitors—a bloody murrain seize the whole race!" ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... "for King he is none, and crowned he will never be, should be in Orleans, leading his men; and lo! he is tied to the belt of fat La Tremouille, and is dancing of ballets at Chinon—a murrain on him, and on them that make his music!" Then he fell to cursing his King, a thing terrible to hear, and so to asking me questions about myself. I told him that I had fled my own country for a man-slaying, hoping, may Heaven ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... potato crop in Ireland has failed! This, then—the failure of the potato crop in Ireland—is the immediate cause, the necessity, of abolishing the protections to agriculture in Great Britain! Was there ever such logic? What has the murrain in potatoes to do with the question of foreign competition, as applied to English, Scottish, nay, Irish corn? We are old enough to recollect something like a famine in the Highlands, when the poor ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... practice is applied to our well-studied and proven scheme; when we see how far our allowance for "chances" has fallen below what is needed to cover the contingencies of late springs, dry summers, early frosts, grasshoppers, wire-worms, Colorado beetles, midge, weevil, pip, murrain, garget, milk-fever, potato-rot, oats-rust, winter-killing, and all the rest; when we learn the degree of vigilance needed to keep every minute of hired labor and team-work effectively employed; and when we come finally to the items of low markets and bad ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... that you do not overreach me, master. You are not the first man whom I have known to have fallen, even sometimes to the endangering, if not breaking, of his own neck, for endeavouring to rise all at once. A murrain seize thee for a blockheaded booby, cried the angry seller of sheep; by the worthy vow of Our Lady of Charroux, the worst in this flock is four times better than those which the Coraxians in Tuditania, a country of Spain, used to sell for a gold talent each; and how much dost thou think, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... I have to report that I have sold the wool to Master Baldwin of Winchester at two shillings a bale more than it fetched last year, for the murrain among the sheep has raised ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Sir. I suspect tricks, Sir; I smell a rat: I do, I do. You would cog the die upon us: you would, you would, Sir. But I will forestall you, Sir. You would be deriving me from William the Conqueror, with a murrain to you. It is no such thing, Sir. The town shall know better, Sir. They begin to smoke your flams, Sir. Mr. Liston may be born where he pleases, Sir; but I will not be born at Lup—Lupton Magna for anybody's pleasure, Sir. My son and I have looked over the great map of Kent together, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... "A murrain on y'r sowl!" said he, "as there's plague in y'r body, and hell in the slide of y'r feet, like the trail of the red spider. And out o' that come ye, Heldon, for I know y're there. Out of that, ye beast! . . . But how can ye go back—you ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... returned towards his ship, but before he went aboard, he would needs eat an egg or twain to satisfy his hunger; and within short space he became dumb and out of his wits, as he afterwards said. When he would have entered into the ship, the mariners beat him back with a cudgel, saying, "What a murrain lacks the ass? Whither the devil will this ass?" The ass, or young man—I cannot tell by which name I should term him—being many times repelled, and understanding their words that called him ass, considering that he could speak never ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... MUCH. O, murrain on ye! have you two 'scap'd hanging?[190] Hark ye, my lord: these two fellows kept at Barnsdale Seven year to ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... little flies that swarmed from out the earth and air! And the murrain of the camels, and cattle in the field! She prayed the king for love of her to hear the people's prayer And send the slaves far hither;—but for ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... nobly gobbling down His fortune, took to living on the town, A social beast of prey, with no fixed home, He ranged and ravened o'er the whole of Rome; His maw unfilled, he'd turn on friend and foe; None was too high for worrying, none too low; The scourge and murrain of each butcher's shop, Whate'er he got, he stuffed into his crop. So, when he'd failed in getting e'er a bit From those who liked or feared his wicked wit, Then down a throat of three-bear power he'd cram Plate after plate of offal, tripe or lamb, And swear, as Bestius might, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... hundred people—colored, of course—were collected, put aboard a ship, and dumped upon this unknown land. It will surprise no one to learn that pretty soon these people, poisoned by malaria, stung by venomous insects and reptiles, and having scarcely anything to eat, were dying like cattle with the murrain. In the end a ship was sent to bring ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... "A murrain on those folk. There has been bungling among the pack-riders. That new man Derek is an oaf ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... "Who are you—with a murrain to you? No honest buyer, I'll warrant, but a hanger-on of the dicers—or something worse. Go! dance off, and find fitter company, or I'll give you a tune to a little quicker time than ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... possessions, from the machinations of the devil and his agents. Every calamity that befell him he attributed to a witch. If a storm arose and blew down his barn, it was witchcraft; if his cattle died of a murrain—if disease fastened upon his limbs, or death entered suddenly and snatched a beloved face from his hearth—they were not visitations of Providence, but the works of some neighbouring hag, whose wretchedness or insanity caused the ignorant to raise their finger and point at her as ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... kept from deteriorating in value by incessant labour, in which a score of different classes of clerks and workmen in the service of the treasury all took part, according to their trades. If the tax were received in oxen, it was led to pasturage, or at times, when a murrain threatened to destroy it, to the slaughter-house and the currier; if it were in corn, it was bolted, ground to flour, and made into bread and pastry; if it were in stuffs, it was washed, ironed, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... blew rough, it made me start And think of my poor boy tossing about Upon the roaring seas. And then I seem'd To feel that it was hard to take him from me For such a little fault. But he was wrong Oh very wrong—a murrain on his traps! See what they've brought ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... all ruined," said a burly 'prentice, with a wooden shovel over his shoulder; "since every day a fresh ale-house is closed; and no new licences are granted. Murrain seize all such monopolists! They are worse than the fly in hops, ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... against the St. Quentins. I remembered his face as he cried to M. le Comte that they should meet again; and I thought that M. Etienne was likely to have his hands full with Lucas, without this unlucky tanglement with Mlle. de Montluc. In the darkness and solitude I called down a murrain on his folly. Why could he not leave the girl alone? There were other blue eyes in the world. And it would be hard on humanity ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... a story "Compiled from the Memoirs of One Perkin Althorpe, Esq., Sometime Field-Coronet in His Majesty's Troop of Horse," and was sown thick with objurgation—"Ods-wounds!" "Body o' me!" "A murrain on thee!" "By my halidom!" and all the rest of the sweepings and tailings of Scott ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... the middle of the road with his sacks, and commenced crying his wares afresh. Almost at once Roger opened the door again. "A murrain upon you, noisy rascal," he called; ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... one lad that can do it in all Normandy, and that is yonder hunter," said the younger knight enthusiastic in spite of himself. "Hast thou not known that none but Duke William can bend Duke William's bow—a murrain on him too!" ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... had subsided, a murrain attacked the cattle, and great numbers of all kinds died; so that they became reduced in the same proportion as the race of man had ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... "Now a murrain on thee, Shrope, for mentioning that name," cried Elizabeth her humor changing instantly. "We, too, have somewhat to say of Francis Stafford, but the time is not yet ripe. When it is, then will I hear what thou hast to say. Until then ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... for himself, without any arts by which the pleasure of others may be increased; if to the daily burden of distress any additional weight be added, nothing remains but to despair and die. In Mull the disappointment of a harvest, or a murrain among the cattle, cuts off the regular provision; and they who have no manufactures can purchase no part of the superfluities of other countries. The consequence of a bad season is here not scarcity, but emptiness; and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... smatter, Is but a riding, us'd of course When the grey mare's the better horse; When o'er the breeches greedy women Fight to extend their vast dominion; 700 And in the cause impatient Grizel Has drubb'd her Husband with bull's pizzle, And brought him under Covert-Baron, To turn her vassal with a murrain; When wives their sexes shift, like hares, 705 And ride their husbands like night-mares, And they in mortal battle vanquish'd, Are of their charter disenfranchis'd And by the right of war, like gills, Condemn'd to distaff, horns, and wheels: 710 For when men by their wives are cow'd, Their ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler |
