"Starveling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the little starveling pope Who strives to make his sermons new By stringing florid scraps of hope And faith and love to dazzle you: From Stopford Brooke a phrase or two, A gleaming line from Arnold's page, Whole screeds of Browning and a few Stolen thunders from the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... kicked lustily with the contrary foot. It was all in vain; his steed started, it is true, but it was only to plunge to the opposite side of the road into a thicket of brambles and alder bushes. The schoolmaster now bestowed both whip and heel upon the starveling ribs of old Gunpowder, who dashed forward, snuffling and snorting, but came to a stand just by the bridge, with a suddenness that had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head. Just at this moment a plashy tramp, by the side of ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... progeny. With them we sometimes find the lawful owner, the grub-worm of the Halictus, but stunted and emaciated with fasting. His gluttonous companions, without otherwise molesting him, deprive him of the best of everything. The wretched starveling dwindles, shrivels up and soon disappears from view. His corpse, a mere atom, blended with the remaining provisions, supplies the maggots with one mouthful ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... some of them might be, paid no heed to the dictum of the Greek idealist, who was more practical than they would have supposed. "The man who does not carry his city within his heart is a spiritual starveling." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to themselves, What shall we do to escape starvation? We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar; and help is far.—Yes, in the Ugolino Hungertower stern things happen; best-loved little Gaddo fallen dead on his Father's knees!—The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint: Our poor little starveling Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will see only evil and not good in this world: if he were out of misery at once; he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept alive? It is thought, and hinted; at last it is done. And now Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... i. 205), "the King sent out his Breve to the Mayor and Burghers commanding them not to overrate their houses"; and thus gradually the University got the command of the police, obtained privileges which enslaved the city, and became masters where they had once been despised, starveling scholars. The process was always the same. On the feast of St. Scholastica, for example, in 1354, Walter de Springheuse, Roger de Chesterfield, and other clerks, swaggered into the Swyndlestock tavern in Carfax, began to speak ill of John de Croydon's wine, and ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... their pots were shrouded in pinafores of white paper skilfully calculated to conceal any undue lankiness of stem, left us unmoved. But the sight of the starveling little fir tree reminded us that in the school hospital lay two sick boys whose roseate dreams of London and holidays had suddenly changed to the knowledge that weeks of isolation and imprisonment behind the window-blind with the red cross lay before them. If we could not give them the ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... give a Belgian or Polish starveling a bare bit of bread, and a lonely stick of wood, and a rag of cloth. Bite and stick and cloth are good, but it's a meal and a fire, and some clothing, the man wants. And you have both ready at hand. Things are good, provided by money and skill and ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... of lowly port, Or sprightly maiden, of Love's court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations; A queen in crown of rubies dressed, A starveling in a scanty vest, Are all, as seems to suit thee ...
— The Royal Guide to Wax Flower Modelling • Emma Peachey
... with endless writing; and the dyer with his purple hands, and the fisher from the stream; and the stunted weaver from the loom, and the leper from the Temple gates. They were mad with lust of life, a starveling life that the King had taxed, when he let not the Apura go. They were mad with fear of death; their women followed them with dead children in their arms. They smote down the golden furnishings, they tore the silken ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... timid begin to fall a little back from these extremities; they begin to aspire after a more naked, narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified, and the poetic; and as a means to this, after a general lightening of this baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the starveling story—once, in the hands of Voltaire, as abstract as a parable—begin to be pampered upon facts. The introduction of these details developed a particular ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an object of idolatry to this gaunt starveling to whom, as he expressed it, he had tried to be a little decent. It was quite within the limits of his comprehension that he could step down now and then to Scott. It never would have occurred to him, at that epoch of his experience, that Scott could try to ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the head of her lovely bay tremblingly waited Mobile, never before so empty of men, so full of women and children. Southward, from two to four leagues apart, ran the sun-beaten, breezy margins of snow-white sand-hills evergreen with weird starveling pines, dotted with pretty summer homes and light steamer-piers. Here on the Eastern Shore were the hotels: "Howard's," "Short's," "Montrose," "Battle's Wharf" and Point Clear, where summer society had been wont to resort all the way from ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... chief companions, or rather, their most intimate friends, are the fellows who hang about livery stables, betting-rooms, race-courses, and hippodromes; crop-eared grooms, chaunters, dog-stealers, starveling jockeys, blacklegs, foreign counts, breeders, feeders; these are all "d—d honest fellows," and the "best fellows in the world," although they get their living by cheating the fast ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Mall there was gaiety enough and to spare. A crowd of fine people that sometimes thickened to a mob, hustled by the cits and starveling poets who came to ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... as it was, of the human body. Our highest notions of physical beauty, down to the present day, have been bequeathed to us by the Greeks. The earliest modern sculptors who abandoned the bony, hideous, starveling figures of the monkish Middle Ages, learned their first lessons in better things from Greek bas-reliefs. And if, to-day, forgetting our half-developed bodies, inefficiently nourished, because of our excessive brain-work, and with their muscles weak and flabby from ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... France has taken a great deal of what is good from the English turf, and has excluded most of what is bad. The liberality of the French Jockey Club is declared by Vanity Fair to be in striking contrast with the starveling policy of its English namesake. The Daily Telegraph has recently eulogized the French club for having found out how to rid the turf of the pest of publicans and speculators and clerks of courses, and of all the riffraff that encumber and disgrace it in England, and that make parliamentary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Queen's now manifest hostility, he presently conceived that he had found it in the influence exerted upon her by the Seigneur Davie—that Piedmontese, David Rizzio, who had come to the Scottish Court some four years ago as a starveling minstrel in the train of Monsieur de Morette, the ambassador ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... is passing strange, and yet I know not How to condemn it, but in one plain brief word He never comes to Sunday morning chapel. Methinks he teacheth in some Sunday-school, Feeding the poor and starveling intellect With wholesome knowledge, or on the Sabbath morn He loves the country and the neighbouring spire Of Madingley or Coton, or perchance Amid some humble poor he spends the day, Conversing ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... the cocksure young men who forage about cities in apparent contentment and who express their cynicism in supercilious slang, Escott was shy and lonely. His shrewd starveling face broadened with joy at dinner, and he blurted, "Gee whillikins, Mrs. Babbitt, if you knew how good it is to have ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... port; Or sprightly maiden—of Love's court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations. A Queen in crown of rubies drest, A starveling in a scanty vest, Are all as seems to ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... little bench of heedless bishops here, And there a chancellor in embryo, Or bard sublime, if bard may e'er be so, As Milton, Shakespeare, names that ne'er shall die! Though now he crawl along the ground so low, Nor weeting how the muse should soar on high, Wisheth, poor starveling elf! his paper kite ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... dwelling of a Pope must once have been rich in details befitting its magnificence. With the exception of the very small portion reserved for the Signori, when they visit Pienza, the palace has become a granary for country produce in a starveling land. There was one redeeming point about it to my mind. That was the handsome young man, with earnest Tuscan eyes and a wonderfully sweet voice, the servant of the Piccolomini family, who lives here with his crippled father, and who showed us ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the racks and undressed. An unclean starveling wrapped a gaudy table-cloth about his loins, and hung a white rag over my shoulders. If I had had a tub then, it would have come natural to me to take in washing. I was then conducted down stairs into the wet, slippery court, and the first things that attracted my attention ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so extensive; be you in habits of pigeon-and-hawk-like intimacy with scores of them, for years, you shall never meet one—from the noble, well-lampooned prince of St Georgio, and the courtly Count of Milan, to the poor starveling old man whose cotton pocket-handkerchief contains all his stores, with no patent of nobility to stand him in stead should he be detected in a fraud—one who will not cheat as much as, and whenever he can. As the King of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... of lowly port; Or sprightly maiden, of Love's court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations; A queen in crown of rubies drest; A starveling in a scanty vest; Are all, as seems to ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... merely, but in daily communion of speech. After all, it was impossible to have this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut up in books as in reliquaries—peris et mises en reliquaires de livres. By aid of this starveling stock—pauvre plante et vergette—of the French language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to speak so at all: that, or none, must be for him the medium of what he calls, in one of his great phrases, le discours ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Soon there were a hundred. Soon there was an epidemic. And the Spectre showed no deference to rank. It not only stalked into the tenements of River Court and Railroad Alley—and laid its felling finger on starveling children and drink-shattered men—It visited the large and airy homes on Elm and Maple Streets and Wabash Avenue, where those of wealth and ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... you starveling, you eel skin, you dried neat's tongue, you stockfish! Oh for breath to utter what is like thee!—you tailor's yard, you sheath, you ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... occasionally and incidentally. His opinion of them is indicated more or less picturesquely by the names which he selects for them. There are, for example, Bottom, the weaver; Flute, the bellows-maker; Snout and Sly, tinkers; Quince, the carpenter; Snug, the joiner; Starveling, the tailor; Smooth, the silkman; Shallow and Silence, country justices; Elbow and Hull, constables; Dogberry and Verges, Fang and Snare, sheriffs' officers; Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, and Bull-calf, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... French noble," she muttered, "travelling to London, to the Court perhaps. I wonder who he is. Yes," she said to herself excitedly, "and I wonder too who dared to enter that next room. It must have been that evil-looking traveller, that starveling. I believe he was a thief. It could not have been—Oh no, I know them all ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... knowledge of this passage, Master, or ignorance of everything else, that made certain of the common steadfast dunces of our days speak of thee as if thou hadst been a starveling, neglected poetaster, jealous forsooth of Maitre Francoys Rabelais? See how ignorantly M. Fleury writes, who teaches French literature withal to them of Muscovy, and hath indited a Life of Rabelais. "Rabelais etait ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... otherwise have fallen into them, let her feel the blighting influence of the cold clouds that cannot fail to envelope her and paralyze all her energies in the interim. There is no need of mincing the matter—Canada beneath the skull and cross-bones of St. George, must ever remain a poor, puny starveling; while under the proud and ample folds of the glorious flag of this mighty Republic, she should at once become great, powerful and prosperous, as yet another star added to the refulgent galaxy that now rides high amid the noontide ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... Was loath to send me to the village school, Whereto the sons of men of mark and rule,— Centurions, and the like,—were wont to swarm, With slate and satchel on sinister arm, And the poor dole of scanty pence to pay The starveling teacher on the quarter-day; But boldly took me, when a boy, to Rome, There to be taught all arts that grace the home Of knight and senator. To see my dress, And slaves attending, you'd have thought, no less Than patrimonial fortunes old and great Had furnished ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... instances, observing that the interloper had a voice fully capable of making his wants known, I gave the comfortable little beast ample room to spread himself on the ground, and let the lone little starveling survivor of the rightful brood have ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... Reb Shemuel walked Eliphaz Chowchoski, a miserable-looking Pole whom Reb Shemuel was taking home to supper. In those days Reb Shemuel was not alone in taking to his hearth "the Sabbath guest"—some forlorn starveling or other—to sit at the table in like honor with the master. It was an object lesson in equality and fraternity for the children of many a well-to-do household, nor did it fail altogether in the homes of the poor. "All Israel are brothers," and how better honor the Sabbath ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... appraises. When, by divine grace, we escape from the voice of the crowd, and from the cry of custom, from the delirium of desire, that poor lonely self within us pleads to us in a cry like the call of the starveling crying to the rich man that passes by, "Oh, will you gratify desire? Oh, will you gratify pleasure? Oh, will you stimulate activity, and will you leave me alone? I, yourself, your very self, the foundation of your life, the permanent expression of your immortality—I ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... his horse, and rode to that place; it was like a garrisoned town, teeming with troops, and resounding with the drum and fife. A brilliant campaign was about to open under the auspices of an experienced general, and with all the means and appurtenances of European warfare. How different from the starveling expeditions he had hitherto been doomed to conduct! What an opportunity to efface the memory of his recent disaster! All his thoughts of rural life were put to flight. The military part of his character ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... and rising to take his leave—"An' I don't want to argify with ye, for I'spect you're about right in what you sez about Sunday ways in town—but I tell ye what, young feller!—you've got to 'ave a deal o' patience an' a deal o' pity for they poor starveling sinners wot gits boxed up in cities an' never ain't got no room to look at the sky, or see the wide fields with all the daisies blowin' open to the sun. No wonder they're so took up wi' their scinetific muddlins over worms an' microbes an' ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Lisbon. This capital, however, at that time, contained 60,000 fighting men, a powerful fortress, and ships in the river. Yet did Junot make his entry with 6000 of the poorest troops, in a physical sense, that Europe could show. Foy admits, that the majority were poor starveling boys, who could scarcely hold their muskets from cold and continual wet, hurried by forced marches, ill fed, desponding, and almost ripe for the hospital. Vast crowds had assembled to see the entry. "What!" exclaimed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... none here but we two? When didst thou see the starveling schoolmaster? That rat, that shrimp, that spindle-shank, That wren, that sheep-biter, that lean chitty-face, That famine, that lean envy, that all-bones, That bare anatomy, that Jack-a-Lent, That ghost, that shadow, that moon ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... men should sing who labour i' the sun, but thy starveling love, thou clod, 'twere fit to tell to thy mother when she stirs in bed ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... As some poor starveling at a palace gate Sees curtained gleams from banquet-litten halls, Hears song out-ringing from the festal walls, Scents viands that shall princely palates sate, Yet in the outer gloom may only wait, Crouched in the cold, thrice-thankful for some least Mean morsel flung him from the plenteous ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... Quince the carpenter, Snug the joiner. Bottom the weaver. Flute the bellows-mender. Snout the tinker, and Starveling the taylor] In this scene Shakespeare takes advantage of his knowledge of the theatre, to ridicule the prejudices and competitions of the players. Bottom, who is generally acknowledged the principal actor, declares his inclination to be for a tyrant, for a part of ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... wizened shrub, a starveling bough, A fleecy thistle filched from by the wind, A weed, Pan's trampling ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... immediately silenced by his master, who, taking his pipe from his mouth, awaited with inquiring aspect the address of this equivocal personage. The stranger eyed old Jack for a moment, so portly in his dimensions, and decked out in gorgeous apparel; then cast a glance upon his own threadbare and starveling condition, and the scanty bundle which he held in his hand; then giving his shrunk waistcoat a twitch to make it meet his receding waistband; and casting another look, half sad, half humorous at the sturdy yeoman, ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... representatives. And so, instead of 'the blessed hope of everlasting life,' the bereaved have been driven to this pathetic and miserable substitute, the barbaric belief in ghosts and daemons, which was old before Christianity was young. And what a starveling hope it is that necromancy offers us! An existence as poor and unsubstantial as that of Homer's Hades, which the shade of Achilles would have been glad to exchange for serfdom to the poorest farmer, and with no guarantee of permanence, even if the power ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... A little starveling Mouse had made his way with some difficulty into a basket of corn, where, finding the entertainment so good, he stuffed and crammed himself to such an extent, that when he would have got out again he found the hole was ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... of a starveling tree, growing out of a cleft where there was so little earth that it seemed to draw its sustenance from the rock. It was a scraggy, stunted thing, but it was well for him that it had struck root there, for its branches brushed the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and compare them, technic for technic, life for life, morality for morality, with this majestic Shakspere, who starts in a dream, who presently encounters the real, who after a while conquers it to its proper place (for Shakspere, mind you, does not forget the real; he will not be a beggar nor a starveling; we have documents which show how he made money, how he bought land at Stratford; we have Richard Quincy's letter to 'my lovveinge good frend and contreyman Mr. Wm. Shakspere, deliver thees,' asking the loan of thirty pounds 'uppon Mr. Bushells and my securytee,' ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... honest Teddy, think of such a wretch, And learn to shun his vices, one and all. Though richer than a Jew, he was more poor Than is the meanest beggar. At the cost Of other men a glutton. At his own, A starveling. A mere scrub. And such a coward, A cozener and liar—but a coward, And would have been a thief—But ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... Good makes good, and what it is I must become. Man is heir not to any possession or commodity, though it were a homestead in all heavens, but to the moral power which we ache to exercise. To-day I am a poor starveling of Nature, sucking many a dry straw, but so sure as God I shall stream like the sun. The meanest creature is a promise of such power, for in each is some radiation as well as suction. Man grows, indeed, faster than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... economical school, which contrasts so poorly with the lavish republican expenditure in French Senegambia. They have, to their honour be it said, often protested against the taxes raised from struggling merchants and a starveling population, poor as Hindus, being expended upon an 'imperial policy.' But economy is the order of the day at home, and an Administrator inclined to parsimony gladly seizes the opportunity of pleasing his 'office.' The result is truly melancholy. I complained in 1862 that the 'civil ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... and bearded (meaning the Swiss guard probably) obeying a puny little person like the King. They were also fairly puzzled at seeing men gorged with plenty and living in ostentation on one side of the road, and starveling ruffians begging their bread in the gutter on the other without attempting to take the rich men by the throat, or even burn their houses. On which the essayist's comment is "Tout cela ne va pas trop mal; mais quoy! ils ne portent ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... foul places, blind With harpy-wings, and sulphurous with the glare Of sinful furnaces—where hunger toiled, And pleasure gathered in a starveling prey, And death fed ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... noble things in this world are great hearts and great brains. There is no virtue in a starveling piety which turns all beauty into ugliness and shrivels up every natural affection. Let the heart beat high with courage and enterprise, and throb with warm passion. Let the brain be an active engine of thought, imagination and will. The ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... Irish knight,' he went on, his narrow eyes gleaming with suspicion. 'He sayeth now that he will not fight with any knight unless he be of blood royal on his mother's side or father's. Say, are ye some starveling knight's ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... must be candid and sincere, or his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable. He should have fancy, or his starveling propositions will perish for lack of metaphor and the tropes and figures needed to vitalise a truism. He does well to have humour, for humour makes men brothers, and is perhaps more influential in an essay than in most places else. He will find a little wit both serviceable ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... the question answered, though even now it is in the way of answering. Yet I know that their wickedness shall fall upon their own heads, and I seem to see them, the proudest of the peoples of the earth, bereft of fame and wealth and honour, a starveling remnant happy in nothing save their past. What Drake began at Gravelines God will finish in many another place and time, till at last Spain is of no more account and lies as low as the ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... its motto's sake This scarecrow from the shelf I take; Three starveling volumes bound in one, Its covers warping in the sun. Methinks it hath a musty smell, I like its flavor none too well, But Yorick's brain was far from dull, Though Hamlet ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. |
