"Petard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been hoist with his own petard; the very adroitness with which he had contrived to get rid of an inconvenient rival had only served to destroy his own ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... him this way or that; if he doesn't want to do a thing he won't do it. Of course what he says is true enough—I did let him choose the date, and I did ask these people because I thought it would be good for him, and I did insist on doing so when he begged me not to. Well, I'm hoist with my own petard this time, though I wouldn't confess as much to him if my life depended on it. But the trickery of the little wretch! It's ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... refreshment of tea with him, and how his servant detected a resemblance to the busts sold in Red Lion Square. He also appeared at a party at Lady Primrose's, much to her alarm. {107} He prowled about the Tower with Colonel Brett, and thought a gate might be damaged by a petard. His friends, including Beaufort and Westmoreland, held a meeting in Pall Mall, to no purpose. The tour had no results, except in the harmless region of the fine arts. A medal was struck, by Charles's orders, and we have the following information for collectors of ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... PETARD. A hat-shaped metal machine, holding from 6 to 9 lbs. of gunpowder; it is firmly fixed to a stout plank, and being applied to a gate or barricade, is fired by a fuse, to break or blow it open. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... weapons used by the Orangemen in their attack on this Bill was to be found in their repeated insinuations as to the unfitness of the Estates Commissioners to exercise dispassionately the functions which would be demanded of them. In this the Unionists were hoist with their own petard, for the necessity recognised by the Government for placing the Estates Commissioners in a position other than that of mere Executive officers, by giving them a judicial tenure independent of ministerial pressure or party influences, was strongly shown by the incident of the Moore-Bailey ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... haven't the beads. In the second place, I want to make him all the trouble I possibly can. Now that he has me, he doesn't know what to do with me. Hoist by his own petard. Do you want the truth? Well, I'm not worried in the least. I feel as if I'd been invited to some ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... busy days for Isabelle. Percy and Jack were always under foot. They furnished comic relief when her military intrigue threatened to become serious. Then her "god-son," Jean Jacques Petard, who was wounded and in a hospital, replied to her maternal solicitude with prolonged and passionate devotion. Isabelle shared the treasure with Agnes, who protested that none of her godsons wrote to her like that; and she asked to have Jean back. Isabelle stoutly refused. A gift was a gift. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... desired at Charleston, and, I believe, throughout the Cotton States. Certainly, when I was there, the war-party, the party of the "Mercury," was not in the ascendant, unless in the sense of having been "hoist with its own petard" when it cried out for immediate hostilities. Not only Governor Pickens and his Council, but nearly all the influential citizens, were opposed to bloodshed. They demanded independence and Fort Sumter, but desired and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... candles. It was about the size of my busby—large enough to hold several pounds of powder. Duroc filled it while I cut off the end of a candle. When we had finished, it would have puzzled a colonel of engineers to make a better petard. I put three cheeses on the top of each other and placed it above them, so as to lean against the lock. Then we lit our candle-end and ran for shelter, shutting the door of the ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Hill; and probably had stolen a pair of boots at Furnes, when he kindly made a call at the Deanery, in passing through that place to the field of battle. It is always a pleasure to see the engineer of mischief "hoist with his own petard;" [Footnote: "Hamlet," but also "Ovid:"— "Lex nec justior ulla est, **Quam necis artifices arte perire sua."] and it happened that the horses assigned to draw a post-chariot carrying Lord Westport, myself, and the dean, on our return journey to ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... stomach," said Cetewayo grimly, thereby indicating in native fashion that the biter had been bit or the engineer hoist with his petard. "It is long since there has been a war in the land, and some of these young soldiers who have never used an assegai save to skin an ox or cut the head from a chicken, shout too loud and leap too high. Now they will be quieter, and while you stay here ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... we are also told, is an elevating influence in life; but unless one is very careful one may get hoist with one's own petard to a pitifully transitory soar above common humanity. The soar itself is not unpleasant, but the sequel is ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... for you!" she snapped. "Let you be hoist by the same petard that's always lying around to hoist me! What do you think of me, Duffer—and after all the proofs we've just had of the dangerous creature I am? Why, the whole trouble at Luxor was on my account. Even you must see that. Monny and I wouldn't have been let into Rechid's house ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... evidently much perturbed by the conversation with her nephew of which we are merely describing the latter half. She was labouring under an uncomfortable sense of being hoist with her own petard—an uncomfortable memory of a certain warning of her husband's, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... admirer of the lady who presides at the bar, and always stops to have a little badinage with her en passant. He has his regular walks on the Boulevards and in the Palais Royal, where he sets his watch by the petard fired off by the sun at midday. He has his daily resort in the Garden of the Tuileries, to meet with a knot of veteran idlers like himself, who talk on pretty much the same subjects whenever they meet. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... quickly. "If I agree to what you propose, it is, after all, you who triumph, not I. And I doubt if I could stop him now, even if I tried." He laughed again, for the third time, savagely. "You are hoist with your own petard, Verney. You wanted to see me sacked; and now that there is a chance in a thousand that Caesar will be sacked, you squirm. I swore to get my knife into you, and, by ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Peter talked, or rather listened, to that young lady, though sighing internally. Then, Laus Deo! up came the poor little chap, whom Peter had libelled in age and affections, only ten minutes before, and set Peter free. He turned to see how Leonore's petard was progressing, to find her and Pell deep in tennis. But just as he was going to expose his ignorance ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... and on the different promenades. Even the churches are not exempt from these demonstrations: I was present at the Te Deum performed on the Emperor's birthday, in St. Mark's, when the moment of elevating the host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in the centre of the cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable utility, and worse than questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of the Italianissimi, and though possibly the strictness of the patriotic discipline in which the members of the Committee keep their fellow- citizens ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Secretary in a body and said, "Appoint handicappers, and arrange a race which shall break Shackles and humble the pride of his owner." The Districts rose against Shackles and sent up of their best; Ousel, who was supposed to be able to do his mile in 1-53; Petard, the stud-bred, trained by a cavalry regiment who knew how to train; Gringalet, the ewe-lamb of the 75th; Bobolink, the pride of ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... seal'd: and my two schoolfellows,— Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd,— They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way And marshal me to knavery. Let it work; For 'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petard: and 't shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines And blow them at the moon: O, 'tis most sweet, When in one line two crafts directly meet.— This man shall set me packing: I'll lug the guts into the neighbour room.— Mother, good-night.—Indeed, this counsellor Is now most ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the mechanism, and the wheels had ceased their whirring. He tried to expostulate in a dazed way, realizing that for once the department was working with a vengeful promptness. He was hoist by his own petard! ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a round-about way of appealing to the tribunal, the jurisdiction of which they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian supernaturalism on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and furnished the elephant ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... commission recently sent abroad to study and report on the institutions of the Western world. Its [Page 243] departure was delayed by the explosion of a bomb in one of the carriages just as the commission was leaving Peking. The would-be assassin was "hoist with his own petard," leaving the public mystified as to the motive ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Farragut had the most unbounded confidence, being placed in command of both. The work had to be done, of course, within range of the hostile batteries, which, through some culpable negligence, failed to molest it. The Pinola carried an electrician with a petard, by which it was hoped to shatter the chains. This attempt, however, failed, owing to the wires of the electrical battery parting before the charge could be exploded. The Itasca, on the other hand, ran alongside one of the schooners and slipped ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... said nothing. We knew Tish never walked in her sleep. She had meant to try out Jasper's racing-car at dawn, forgetting that racers have no mufflers, and she had been, as one may say, hoist with her own petard—although I do not know what a petard is and have never been able ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... feeling somewhat chilled and perplexed, as who would not, having such an invitation before him? I had anticipated an affair with men only—a secret assault or a petard expedition. But seeing the bareness of my room, and the honour the king was doing me, I felt I had no choice, and I answered, 'That being the case, sire, I am ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... typified by making Von Tirpitz, its inventor, an addle-headed seahorse, the nursery comedian of the sea. Stupid and ridiculous bewilderment stares from his foolish eyes. Another submarine has failed to find a safe victim in a trading ship, but has been hoisted with its own sea petard. The impotence of ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the Anglican Church, that is, my subjective idea of that Church. Its bursting would not hurt her with the world, but would be a discovery that she was purely and essentially Protestant, and would be really the "hoisting of the engineer with his own petard." And this was the result. ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... noise.' Indeed, that was what the honest fellow could not do. On the most trifling matter his eyes kindled, his fist visited the table, and his voice rolled abroad in changeful thunder. I never saw such a petard of a man; I think the devil was in him. He had two favourite expressions: 'it is logical,' or illogical, as the case might be: and this other, thrown out with a certain bravado, as a man might unfurl a banner, at the beginning of many a long and sonorous story: 'I am a proletarian, you ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they would soon put a stop to the lax morality of the upper classes. If our builders, artisans and mechanics would club together, and refuse to make guns or ships for our enemies in foreign countries, we should not run the risk of being one day hoisted with our own petard. In any case, the work of Revolution rests with the people, though it is quite true they need teachers to show them ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... set his port vent to his mouth, rapidly filled his bag, while the man stared as if it were a petard with which he was about to blow the door to shivers, and then sent from the instrument such a shriek, as it galloped off into the Lossie Gathering, that involuntarily his adversary pressed both hands to his ears. With a sudden application of his knee Malcolm sent the door wide, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... of the engineer hoist by his own petard is Tolstoy's. The peasants of his country understand him as little as they understand Beethoven, that Beethoven he so bitterly, so unjustly assailed in The Kreutzer Sonata. (Poor Beethoven. Why did not Tolstoy select ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... struck the third from the eastern shore and her men jumped on board. The intention was to explode two charges of powder with a slow match over the chains, and a torpedo by electricity under the bows of the hulk, a petard operator being on board. The charges were placed, and the Pinola cast off. The operator claims that he asked Bell to drop astern by a hawser, but that instead of so doing, he let go and backed the engines. Be this as it may, the ship ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... direct and absolute; then, bracing his head against the sand foundation, he began pushing with his hind legs to move off the selected portion. I thought to help him, and carefully pushed it with a small reed until it rolled over on the sand, and he with it, innocuously hoist by his own petard. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... cried Fandor. "Here's a go! What a pretty petard in prospect!... Jacques Dollon was innocent; you arrest him; he is so terrified that he hangs himself! Well, old boy, I must say you make some fine ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... of his Elements de Litterature (1787), were full of instruction for his own time, delicate and just in observation, as they often were, if not penetrating or profound. In his earlier Poetique Francaise—"a petard," said Mairan, "laid at the doors of the Academy to blow them up if they should not open"—he had shown himself strangely disrespectful towards the fame of Racine, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... alluding to the riot, took the Scotch side of the broil. This was sufficient. At the election following he was a defeated candidate, and politely advised to retire to private life. Thus was the Hon. J. H. "hoist by his own petard," the first man to fall by this ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... hark! Now the soft peace-march beats, home, brothers, home! The caps and helmet are all garlanded With green boughs, the last plundering of the fields. The city gates fly open of themselves, They need no longer the petard to tear them. The ramparts are all filled with men and women, With peaceful men and women, that send onwards. Kisses and welcomings upon the air, Which they make breezy with affectionate gestures. From all ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a sort of sublime Guy Fawkes, lurking in the infernal cellar, preparing the train of that stupendous Gunpowder Plot by which he hopes, on the day of judgment, to blow up the world parliament of unbelievers with a general petard of damnation. Will the King connive at this nefarious prowler and permit him to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... burden, but shaking with laughter. He was hoist with his own petard, but his burden grew lighter all the same. I ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... certain old targets, for monuments rather than use, and many engines of war; as, a screw to force open a gate, an instrument like a jack, with wheels to carry match for certain hours' space, and just at the set time to give fire to a mine, petard, or the like. There were, in all, arms for about fifteen hundred horse and fifteen thousand foot. They keep a garrison constantly in pay of twelve hundred soldiers, and they have forty companies of their citizens, two hundred in each company, proper men; whose interest of wives, children, ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... malverigo, malverigxo. Pervious penetrebla. Pest pesto. Pester enui, turmenteti. Pestiferous pesta. Pestilence pesto. Pestilential pesta, pestiga. Pestle pistilo. Pet dorloti. Petal florfolieto. Petard petardo. Petition petegi. Petition petskribo. Petrify sxtonigi. Petroleum petrolo. Petticoat subjupo. Pettish malgxentila. Petty malgranda. Petulance petoleco. Petulant petola. Pew pregxbenko. Pewter stano. Phantom ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Once, Ford thought he heard groans from the black shadow where the fat cook had disappeared, but he could not be sure. On the other side of the private car, and half-way between it and the forty-thousand-pound load of high explosives, the petard oyster-tin lay undisturbed, with the carving-knife sticking ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... something of the morally awful and solemnly remonstrative, in the way in which the past is evoked to visit its ghostly retribution upon us. The old sting rankles in the English breast. She is looking on now to see us hoist by our own petard. These pamphlet pages, with their circumscribed limits and their less ambitious aims, do not invite an elaborate dealing with the facts of the case, which would expose the sophistical, if not the vengeful spirit of this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... whistled like a whirlwind of iron round Henri's head, and twenty men fell in an instant before his eyes. "Forward!" cried he, and rushed on through the midst of the fire, and arrived just as the soldiers had fired the first petard. The gate was broken in two places; the second petard was lighted, and a new opening was made in the wood; but twenty arquebuses immediately passed through, vomiting balls on the soldiers and officers, and the men fell like ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... was confessedly preparing to encourage an English subject in treason to his sovereign. Was it so wrong to hoist the engineer with his own petard? Was it wrong of Hamlet to finger the packet of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and rewrite his uncle's despatch? Let us have done with cant in these matters. Mary Stuart was at Sheffield Castle in charge of Lord Shrewsbury, and Fitzwilliam could not see her without an order from the ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... all his having and his holding Reduced to eternal noise and scolding,— The conjugal petard that tears Down all portcullises of ears. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... rather inclined to resent Jack's failure to let them take a hand in the capture of Monkey Rae. They rallied Jack not a little on his grand effort at heroism and Rand even dug up an old schoolbook quotation about an engineer who had been hoist with his own petard. The boys took their disappointment out in various good natured gibes, and mock congratulations to "the Sherlock Holmes of the good steamer Queen" were a daily occurrence until the arrival at Ketchikan and new scenes drove the incident from the boys' ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... moved by this confidence, was stirred to begin an endless account of his domestic misfortunes, and old Mrs. Regan, becoming impatient, had already begun to interrupt with an account of Regan's recent hoisting on the wings of a premature petard, ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... dangling about his legs, thrust his head into our tent-door, and favored us with the few observations we had lost by reason of our hasty departure. Keifer turned his face to the wall and groaned. Poor man! he had been hoisted by his own petard. I think Uncle Jacob suspected that the young men had set up a job ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... do with the powder, then?" asked Uncle Bob; "save it to hoist some of the scoundrels with their own petard?" ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn |
