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More "Byword" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of self-sacrifice. But we have not come scathless out of the ordeal. And besides our inevitable losses we are suffering from criminal waste. No other country is so thriftless as ours. In this respect we are a byword among the peoples of the world. But we give no thought to the consequences. Yet the yearly outlay on the one hand and the means of meeting it on the other hand are calculable, and it would be well if those ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... antiquarian times it was George Wither. When most of the Jacobean poets sank into comfortable oblivion, which merely meant being laid with a piece of camphor in cotton-wool to keep fresh for us, Wither had the misfortune to be recollected. He became a byword of contempt, and the Age of Anne persistently called him Withers, a name, I believe, only possessed really by one distinguished person, Cleopatra Skewton's page-boy. Swift, in The Battle of the Books, brings in this poet as the ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... Isle, And gaze upon the sea; That element may meet thy smile— It ne'er was ruled by thee! Or trace with thine all idle hand, In loitering mood upon the sand, That Earth is now as free! That Corinth's pedagogue[114] hath now Transferred his byword to thy brow. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... the Constitution, having pledged the Constitution to the protection of slave property, it required an almost superhuman effort to confine the evil to one section of the country. Like a loathsome disease it spread itself over the body politic until our nation became the eyesore of the age, and a byword among the nations of the world. The time came when our beloved country had to submit to heroic treatment, and the cancer of slavery was ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... woman—Paris a Helen, Antony a Cleopatra, and Varro a Saronia, whilst I, for my own part, see in her only a deep, designing woman, part tiger, part serpent. The tiger hath a lovely sleek body with a furious heart; the serpent for its creeping artfulness is a byword for deceit. Do not get within her fatal circle, or she will sting thee to the very core, and then devour thee. I hate her! She has robbed me of my peace, and now, with deep conceit and hellish pride, she deigns not to turn her head this way. Oh that ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... Luca cared for nothing but his studies, satisfied with a piece of bread or a few maccaroni. When their purse was low, the old man would accompany him to the scene of his labors, and constantly urge him on, by repeating Luca, fa presto, (hurry Luca) which became a byword among the painters, and was fixed upon the young artist as a nickname, singularly appropriate to his wonderful celerity of execution. He afterwards traveled through Lombardy to Venice, still accompanied by his father, and having studied the works of Correggio, Titian, and other great masters, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... condition have come into collision, cannot long subsist together on a mere Poor-law. True enough:—and yet, human beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too, till something better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a byword among the nations. O, what a waste is there; of noble and thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms; valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,—which all the metal of Potosi cannot purchase back; to which the metal of ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... oranges everywhere for the picking, and a host of kindred wonders in which her untravelled neighbour friends were to be instructed. And instead she found the very name of California and El Monte were a byword and a hissing in the mouths of the inhabitants of Orchard Glen, and had to spend the first month after her return ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... already made one mistake, tumbling head over heels in love with a young fellow who had mortified her before the world when their engagement was less than a few months old, making her name and affections a byword, and she could not and would not repeat the blunder. This had shattered her customary self-reliance, leaving her wellnigh helpless. Perhaps after all—an unheard-of thing in her experience—she had better seek advice of some older and wiser pilot. Two heads, ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... then thyself! thy godship abdicate! Renounce Olympus! lavish here on him Thy pity and thy care! he may perchance Make thee his wife—at least his paramour! But thither go not I! foul shame it were Again to share his bed; the dames of Troy Will for a byword hold me; and e'en now My soul with endless sorrow ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... that is their mean yet mighty byword of reproach—the watchword with which they assassinated, hanged, and made away with Concini; and if I gave them their way they would assassinate, hang, and make away with me in the same manner, although they have nothing to complain of except a tax or two now ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... than the uncomplaining boy Five years his slave and swineherd! In him rage Burst forth, with fear commixed, as when a beast Strains in the toils. "Can I alone stand firm?" He mused; and next, "Shall I, in mine old age, Byword become—the vassal of my slave? Shall I not rather drive him from my door With wolf hounds and a curse?" As thus he stood He marked the gifts, and bade men bare them in, And homeward signed the ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... greatest masters of the form are inconsistent with the motives that impelled them to its use, and where these motives were followed to their logical conclusion, the resuit, both in literature and in life, became a byword for absurd unreality. To live at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms, pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality of a decadent court or as the plaything of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... this rule in Scripture, or indeed in any literature, is probably one drawn up and condensed into a single verse by Paul. You will find it in a letter—the second to the Corinthians—written by him to some Christian people who, in a city which was a byword for depravity and licentiousness, were seeking the higher life. To see the point of the words we must take them from the immensely improved rendering of the Revised translation, for the older Version in this case greatly obscures the sense. They ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... my lord, that I should tamely submit to be a derided, outcast husband, that I should take no vengeance upon, that villainous Pope for having made me a thing of scorn, a byword throughout Italy?" Livid hate writhed in his fair young face. "Did you think I should, indeed, remain in Pesaro, whither I fled before their threats to my life, ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... men like Philip Doddridge (1702-51), the hymn writer, were affording room at least for ample discussion among the students, and moderate as his own opinions were he is credited with having made so-called 'orthodoxy' a byword. The Independents, Caleb Fleming and Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768), led the way to 'Humanitarian' views, the latter being a learned writer of much influence. It is said that another great hymn writer, Isaac Watts, finally shared the Humanitarian ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... remember that, when I was a schoolmaster, one of my colleagues was a perfect byword for the disorder and noise that prevailed in his form. I happened once to hold a conversation with him on disciplinary difficulties, thinking that he might have the relief of confiding his troubles to a sympathising ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... find Emanuel Swedenborg walking with stately tread through college, taking all the honors, looked upon by teachers and professors with a sort of awe, and pointed out by his fellow students in subdued wonder. His physical strength became a byword, yet we do not find he ever exercised it in contests; but it served as a protection, and commanded ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... best powers within me for my own personal improvement, and will strive unceasingly to quicken the sense of racial duty and responsibility; I will in all these ways aim to uplift my race so that, to everyone bound to it by ties of blood, it shall become a bond of ennoblement and not a byword of reproach. ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... produced a terrible effect on Sancerre, and was cruelly retorted on the Sappho of Saint-Satur when, seeing her childless after five years of married life, little de la Baudraye became a byword for laughter. To understand this provincial witticism, readers may be reminded of the Bailli de Ferrette—some, no doubt, having known him—of whom it was said that he was the bravest man in Europe ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... from the account of the early life of Dickens that Chesterton gently leads us to the birth of the immortal Mr. Pickwick, that supreme Englishman who is a byword amongst even those who scarcely know Dickens. The birth pangs of the advent of Pickwick was a sharp quarrel 'that did no good to Dickens, and was one of those which occurred far too ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... came like a wave. Everybody felt it at once. People wondered how any sane, intelligent community could tolerate the presence of a set of corrupt scoundrels like the twenty aldermen of the city. Their names, it was said, were simply a byword throughout the United States for rank criminal corruption. This was said so widely that everybody started hunting through the daily papers to try to find out who in blazes were aldermen, anyhow. Twenty names are hard to remember, and as ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... His affection for his father, always deep, had increased of late years with the knowledge that James looked on him as the real prop of his decline. It seemed pitiful that one who had been so careful all his life and done so much for the family name—so that it was almost a byword for solid, wealthy respectability—should at his last gasp have to see it in all the newspapers. This was like lending a hand to Death, that final enemy of Forsytes. 'I must tell mother,' he thought, 'and when it comes on, we must keep the papers ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Arranstoun of the Court of James IV of Scotland, whose exploits had been the terror and admiration of the whole country, and who was even yet a byword for ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... Antiochia won, Be glorious acts, and full of glorious praise, By Heaven's mere grace, not by our prowess done: Those conquests were achieved by wondrous ways, If now from that directed course we run The God of Battles thus before us lays, His loving kindness shall we lose, I doubt, And be a byword to the ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... was here that Wolfe Tone and the men I told you of dined three years ago—and a merry day they had of it. I could wish we had a few of the scraps they left. It's cold work sleeping in the open on an empty stomach, but we must just cheer each other with Tone's byword— ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... his verses in praise of her, she turned back to him and embracing him, with a heart on fire for the anguish of severance, fire which naught save kisses and embraces might quench, cried, "Sooth the byword saith, Patience is for a lover and not the lack thereof. There is no help for it but I contrive a means for our reunion." Then she farewelled him and fared forth, knowing not where she set her feet, for stress of her love; nor did she stay her steps till ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... softening adjective, "I have learnt with pain and indignation that you have dishonoured yourself again by breaking the pledge you gave me to abstain from politics. With still greater pain and indignation do I learn that your name has become in a few short days a byword, that you have discarded the weapon of false, insidious arguments against my class—the class to which you owe everything—for the sword of the assassin. It has come to my knowledge that you have an assignation to-morrow with my good friend M. de La Tour d'Azyr. A gentleman of his station ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... cried, as if he were really too shocked to speak at all; "seven-ty dollars! Make it eighty! Oh, it is a sin and a shame, gentlemen, and the fair fame of this beautiful city is eternally ruined. It will become a wagging of the head and a byword among the nations. Sev-en-ty dollars!"—then hotly and indignantly—"seventy dollars!—fifth and last time, seventy dollars!"—here he raised his ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... disarm the animosity of the people, and enduring not only menaces but even insult;[227] being ignorant in what direction to turn her steps, lest she should throw herself into the power of her arch-enemy. Her proud heart was bruised; her great name had become a byword and a scorn; the wife and the mother of kings, before whose frown the high-born and the powerful had once shrunk, sat shivering in the vast halls of a foreign palace, shrinking beneath the hoarse cries of a hostile multitude, and quailing in ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... made a pitiful and passionate appeal in the Senate Chamber: "Romans, allies, friends! help! help! Hannibal is at the gates of our city. Hannibal, the sworn enemy of Rome. Hannibal the terrible. Hannibal who fears not the gods, neither keeps faith with men. ["Punic faith" was a byword.] O Romans, fathers, friends! help while there is ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... of organizing a new government. Their instructions were limited to revising and proposing improvements in the Articles of the existing Confederation, whose inefficiency and weakness, now that the cohesive power of common danger in the war of the Revolution was gone, had become a byword. This task, however, was decided to be hopeless, and with great boldness the convention proceeded to disregard instructions and prepare a wholly new Constitution constructed on a plan radically different from that of the Articles of Confederation. The contents of the Constitution, ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... her faith in journalism as a drum for the rousing of the people against wrong. Its beat had led too often to the trickster's booth, to the cheap-jack's rostrum. It had lost its rallying power. The popular Press had made the newspaper a byword for falsehood. Even its supporters, while reading it because it pandered to their passions, tickled their vices, and flattered their ignorance, despised and disbelieved it. Here and there, an honest journal advocated ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... deliberate judgment on that. The other may be flimsy and superficial. And if you have not burnt your returned letter, pray re-send it me, as a monumental token of my stupidity. 'Twas a little unthinking of you to touch upon a sore subject. Why, by dabbling in those accursed Albums, I have become a byword of infamy all over the kingdom. I have sicken'd decent women for asking me to write in Albums. There be "dark jests" abroad, Master Cornwall; and some riddles may live to be clear'd up. And 'tis not every saddle is put on the right steed; and forgeries ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... distinctly dumpy: A flowing cape it's certain will Well—not become one short and stumpy. Yet since, although you are not tall, You wear a cape, you may take my word That in the mouths of one and all You have become a very byword. ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... angels, enlarging for their minds, to know what hell is like! As a matter of fact, Tybar himself is nearer to the superhuman than anything I saw knocking about at Mons. His daring and his coolness and his example are a byword in a battalion composed, my dear, with the solitary exception of the writer, entirely of heroes. In sticky places Tybar is the most wonderful thing that ever happened. I like to be near him because his immediate vicinity is unquestionably ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible, the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer, and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to find as clear as they ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... belaud the present system, any more than it is optimistic to say this is the best of all possible worlds. It may be so, but it remains a pity that no better was possible. And Mrs. Grundy herself seems to me as over-abused as marriage. The celerity with which she became a byword, from the moment she made her accidental appearance in Tom Morton's 'Speed the Plough,' shows how the popular instinct needed some such incarnation of our neighbours' opinions. She stands, the representative of the ethical level of the age, not of fixed pruderies. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... money and old clothes; I am to be killed and shamed. If this is the way I am to fall, and me scarce a man—if this is the story to be told of me in all Scotland—if you are to believe it too, and my name is to be nothing but a byword—Catriona, how can I go through with it? The thing's not possible; it's more than a man ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... up by the hair. Behold, I have acquainted thee with her case and it is thine to command, and whatso thou orderest us that we will do. Thou knowest that in this affair is dishonour and disgrace to our name and to thine, and haply the islanders will hear of it, and we shall become amongst them a byword; wherefore it befitteth thou return us an answer with all speed." Then she delivered the letter to a courier and he carried it to the King, who, when he read it, was wroth with exceeding wrath with his daughter ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... has insulted me to my face, or, more cowardly, charged the school-boys to pelt and annoy me. In the larger towns the priest has defamed me through the press, and when I have answered him also by that means, he has heaped insult upon injury, excluded me from society, and made me a pariah and a byword to the superstitious people. I have been stoned and spat upon, hurled to the ground, had half-wild dogs set on me, and my horse frightened that he might throw me. I have been refused police help, or been called to the office to give an account of myself, all because I was a Protestant, or infidel, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... 'For Heart, Home, and Honour,'" repeated Tom; "well, I think that our family never needed such consolations more, if indeed there are any to be found in mottoes. Our Heart is broken, our hearth is desolate, and our honour is a byword, but there remain the 'struggle and ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... crises of great mental agony are common to the most self-restrained of us, "you have been for twenty years a living lie! For twenty years you have cheated and mocked me. For twenty years—in company with a scoundrel whose name is a byword for all that is profligate and base—you have laughed at me for a credulous and hood-winked fool; and now, because I dared to raise my hand to that reckless boy, you confess your shame, and glory in ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... again and again as if to secure time to see into the matter himself, to weigh the pros and cons of the suggestion. Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo was a worthy man who played no part at the Papal Court, whose nullity indeed had become a byword at the Vatican. His childish stories, however, amused the Pope, whom he greatly flattered, and who was fond of leaning on his arm while walking in the gardens. It was during these strolls that Gamba easily secured all sorts of little favours. However, he was ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... becoming a little easier for Wahb. He was gaining in health and strength, and the creatures he daily met now let him alone. But as he feasted on the pinons one morning after a gale, a great Black-bear came marching down the hill. 'No one meets a friend in the woods,' was a byword that Wahb had learned already. He swung up the nearest tree. At first the Black-bear was scared, for he smelled the smell of Grizzly; but when he saw it was only a cub, he took courage and came growling at Wahb. He could climb as well as the ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... Brome, before all these people here gathered. I add this: that if he should live, and it pleases him to break this promise made on his behalf to save him from death, then let his name be shamed, yes, let it become a byword and a scorn. ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... back with her to the Vicarage. He didn't want to meet the Vicar and have the door shut in his face. Rowcliffe, informed by Mrs. Blenkiron, was aware, long before Gwenda had warned him, that he ran this risk. The Vicar's funniness was a byword in the parish. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... idioms either were fast being debased or had become wholly obsolete. Such new-fangled words as "eftsoon," "albeit," "wench," "soothly," "zounds," "whenas," and "sithence" had stolen into common usage, making more direct and simpler speech a jest and a byword. ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... thousand a year, and causes ten thousand murders every year, steals the vittles and clothes from starvin' wimmen and children, has its deadly grip on Church and State, and makes our civilization and Christianity a mock and byword amongst them ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... there is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian, and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", surely more the treatise of the problemist forging his problem, as the ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... had joined us with him at the very instant of the charge that night, died in the charge; so that there was none to give explanation of his conduct. Ranjoor Singh himself was a very rock for silence. Our British officers said nothing, doubtless not suspecting the distrust; for it was a byword that Ranjoor Singh held the honor of the squadron in his hand. Yet of all the squadron only the officers and I now trusted him—the Sikh officers because they imitated the British; the British because faith is a habit with them, once pledged, and I—God knows. There were ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... us love architecture dearly, and believe that it helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among beautiful things, we of the big towns are mostly compelled to live in houses which have become a byword of contempt for their ugliness and inconvenience. The stream of civilisation is against us, and we ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... falling on his knees. "It is impossible! It is impossible! You cannot strike off my father's nose. He cannot go down without his nose to the grave. He will become a laughter and a byword, and all my days and nights will be filled with woe. O reflect! Report that you have seen no such nose in your travels. ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... Monsieur! For in that crude, undeveloped Idea were already germinating the wonders of an achievement grander than any of Schwartz, or Guttenberg, or Galileo. Oh, this beautiful, grand simplicity of Science, which was able, from the snail itself, the very type and symbol and byword of torpidity and inaction, to evolve what was to conquer time and space,—to outrun the wildest imaginings ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... and they showed none now. Nor mercy. The situation would have been ridiculous had it not been so utterly tragic—to have failed without trying! Edwards's escape became camp offal. We became the butt and the byword of the camp, so that I honestly regretted not having pushed on alone. I felt sure that the almost certain capture and more certain punishment would have been more bearable than this. There was nothing that I could say in my own defense except at the other man's expense—which would have been in ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... greatness. Jeffrey's petulant "This will never do," uttered, professedly, at least, more in sorrow than in anger, because the poet would persist, in spite of all friendly counsel, in misapplying his powers, has become a byword of ridiculous critical cocksureness. But the curious thing is that "The Excursion" has not "done," and that the Wordsworthians who laugh at Jeffrey are in the habit of repeating the substance of his criticism, though in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... life they talk of is the bait that covers the hook for gudgeons. You have to accept the superstition, or your beautiful life to them is a byword and a hissing. ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... consisted of brief papers by Mrs. Dodge and Miss Bissell. The former took the ground that the Congress should leave this matter to be decided by the States; that women are not physically qualified to use the ballot; and that its use by them would render "domestic tranquillity" a byword among the people. Miss Bissell began by saying, "It is not the tyranny but the chivalry of men that we have to fear," and opposed the suffrage principally because the majority of women do not want it, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... time boasted many beautiful women, but there is one who must take her place before them all, one whose name is a byword to this day in every corner of that sun-washed country—Bianca di Pianno-Forti. One shudders at that name—so radiant was she, and yet so incredibly evil. Her tragic death somehow seems a fitting ending to a life such as hers—a life so without mercy, so without pity, and yet so amazingly ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the names of oil king and iron master have been a hissing and a byword among the hot-heads in America. Yet oil king and iron master filled a world with motor lorries. The blessings these have brought to every man are more than he can measure. We mention this as one: They stopped the Germans ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... of its sombre appearance from the outside, it is considered one of the most important hotels in West Suffolk, and is still a typical old English inn, "a byword for comfort and generous hospitality throughout the eastern counties." The spacious coffee-room, its well-appointed drawing and sitting-rooms, its many bedrooms, have an appeal to those desiring ease rather than the luxuriousness ...
— The Inns and Taverns of "Pickwick" - With Some Observations on their Other Associations • B.W. Matz
... all means drive Expletives from our highways; They are the ruin of our roads, The byword of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... but I heartily repent of my fault." But the maiden answered, "Your pleadings and your repentance come too late, and nothing can help you more. I dare not overlook your offence, for that would bring me disgrace, and make me a byword among the people. Twice have you sinned against me: for, firstly, you have despised my love; and, secondly, you have stolen my ring; and now you must suffer your punishment." As she spoke, she placed the ring on the thumb of her ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... degree of good fortune which raises us in the world removes us further from truth, because we fear most to wound those whose affection is most useful, and whose dislike is most dangerous. A prince may be the byword of all Europe, yet he alone know nothing of it. I am not surprized; to speak the truth is useful to whom it is spoken, but disadvantageous to those who speak it, since it makes them hated. Now those who live with princes love their own interests ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... say that the fault is wholly Makar Alexievitch's." Finally it became "OF COURSE Makar Alexievitch is to blame." Do you see the sequence of things, my darling? Every mistake was attributed to me, until "Makar Alexievitch" became a byword in our department. Also, while making of me a proverb, these fellows could not give me a smile or a civil word. They found fault with my boots, with my uniform, with my hair, with my figure. None of these things were to their taste: everything had to be changed. And ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... second, do you hear?—till the mystery surrounding these poor lost children has been cleared up, and, living or dead—God forbid it should prove to be the latter!—they are restored to their parents. Now, mark my words, Count, unless my child Elizabeth is found, I'll make your name a byword throughout the length and breadth of the country—I'll——"; but words failed him, and, shaking his fist, he ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... There was ever a fire to extinguish at his throat, nor could he veil his wanton eye at the sight of a pretty wench. Again and again the lust of preaching urged him to repent, yet he slid back upon his past gaiety, until Parson Pureney became a byword. Dismissed from Newmarket in disgrace, he wandered the country up and down in search of a pulpit, but so infamous became the habit of his life that only in prison could he find an audience ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... remember that all prisoners, officers and men, will be henceforth under the charge of the medical department, and that you have full authority to make such arrangements as you may think necessary for their comfort and honourable treatment. I will not have Russia made a byword among civilized peoples.' ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... trade. The fact is, being all of one sort, the profession is overcrowded, and the result is that the sharpest amongst them emigrate, or rather I should say go farther a-field to exercise their craft. I am told that many of the low Jews, who make themselves a byword and a reproach by their practices of cheating and usury throughout Hungary, may be traced back to this foul nest in the Marmaros Mountains. It would be well for the credit of the Jewish community in Hungary, as ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... the Achaeans satisfied with plunder, and death, and women. For after ten years of strife men raven for such things, and will not give over until they have them. Also it was written in the heart of Hera that the walls of Troy must be cast down, and the pride thereof made a byword. So it was that the counsel of King Menelaus was overpassed, and that of Odysseus prevailed. And with him lay the word that he should make his plan, and tell it over to Menelaus, that he might tell it again to Helen when he saw her on ...
— The Ruinous Face • Maurice Hewlett
... distance between her and her quarry seemed to lessen scarcely at all. The old Revenge with her tall sticks and great spread of canvas was flying down before the wind with all the speed that had made her name a byword, and the man with the broken nose was evidently willing to take as many chances ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... tales as fanciful as possible, choosing deliberately to foster the merry humor in which they had been all day. He told her of his father, the crotchety old soldier, whose absurd sense of duty and whose elaborate Southern courtesy had become a byword in the South. He told her household tales that were prized like pieces of the Burrell plate, beautiful heirlooms of sentiment that mark the honor of high-blooded houses; following which there was much to recount of the Meades, from the admiral who fought as a boy in the Bay of Tripoli down to ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Rialto. Society set its seal upon the establishment. The clubs of the immediate neighbourhood, of which there were several, did not think it necessary to install cuisines when Delmonico's was so close at hand. The name of the house is still a byword in the land, but the names of Filippini and Lattard, two of the maitre d'hotel who helped to make Delmonico's famous, have been forgotten by all but a very few. What supper parties were given in the old establishment, and what dances of that ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... in biological opinion occasioned by the deadlock to which Charles-Darwinism has been reduced, though comparatively recent, widens rapidly. Ten years ago Lamarck's name was mentioned only as a byword for extravagance; now, we cannot take up a number of Nature without seeing how hot the contention is between his followers and those of Weismann. This must be referred, as I implied earlier, to growing perception that Mr. Darwin should either ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... there in the event of its being used as a place of retreat should any disaster overtake the ship. During the second year occasional parties camped inside the hut, but no bunks or permanent sleeping quarters were ever erected. The discomfort of the hut was a byword on the Expedition, but it formed an excellent depot and starting-point for all parties proceeding to ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... worst was that our failure to unriddle the enigma In the "rags" of rival towns was made a byword and a scoff, Till each soul in the community felt branded with the stigma Of the unexplained suspicion of poor Biggs's ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... meant, any way; for the old ones were a scandal—yes, be sure. What with sea-water and scrambling after gulls' eggs, they was becoming a byword all over the Islands." ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... of Wisconsin are needed in all other states. 'Expert testimony' has long been a byword and reproach. Of course, under Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence no defendant can be deprived of the right to call witnesses of his own choosing, and after all a medical expert is only a witness who gives opinions instead of facts. Still, a law which ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... it in the office, and had lit that lantern and wuz now hangin' along in the rear of that gay procession, with that mummy-like figger, a jest, a byword and a sneer, for laughter riz up round 'em and sneers follered 'em as they swep' onwards. As they come nigh me I riz up almost wildly and ketched holt of my pardner and ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... bestows good name,—so imposing, in these advantageous lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own conclusions as to his hollow integrity. The Judge, on one side! And who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Maxim.— N. maxim, aphorism; apothegm, apophthegm[obs3]; dictum, saying, adage, saw, proverb; sentence, mot[Fr], motto, word, byword, moral, phylactery, protasis[obs3]. axiom, theorem, scholium[obs3], truism, postulate. first principles, a priori fact, assumption (supposition) 514. reflection &c (idea) 453; conclusion &c (judgment) 480; golden ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his hat in grave gesture. "I feel like a condemned coward, my name a byword for the rabble, being here in such comparative safety, when, in honor, I should ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... The fright produced by this incident, and a very narrow escape, in some degree sobered me, but what I felt more than anything else was the exposure now; all would be known, and I feared my name would become, more than ever, a byword and ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... became a byword. And later, when, out of disorder and vice, the city of Leaping Horse grew to capital importance, he became surfeited with the accumulations of wealth which rolled in upon him ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... already shown how much the monotheistic side of the Egyptian religion resembles that of modern Christian nations, and it will have come as a surprise to some that a people, possessing such exalted ideas of God as the Egyptians, could ever have become the byword they did through their alleged worship of a multitude of "gods" in various forms. It is quite true that the Egyptians paid honour to a number of gods, a number so large that the list of their mere names would fill a volume, ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Villa Negroni, which the Cardinal had built near the Baths of Diocletian. Having attained her first object, Vittoria took less pains to play the saint, and began to dress with unbecoming magnificence and to live on a very extravagant scale. Her name became a byword in Rome and her lovely face was one of the city's sights. The Cardinal, devotedly attached to his nephew, disapproved of the latter's young wife and regretted the many gifts he had bestowed upon her. Like most clever men, too, he was more than reasonably angry at having ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... waiting for us. Our comrades in this adventure are Captain Hoblitzel's company, the 'Swartz-Jaegers,' brawny mechanics, sturdy Teutons, and all of a size. These are Germans, remember, not what we call Hessians; not the kind that are destined to make Pennsylvania a byword; not the kind that advance in clogs but retreat in seven-league boots. We part from our German friends with a rousing cheer, as heartily returned, at a bridge which they are to guard. Then we have the cars to ourselves. Surely this is the ne plus ultra of railway travelling; free ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... said Lucien. "So far, my friends have been mere skirmishers, but I have given them red-hot shot to-night. To-morrow you will know why we are making game of 'Potelet.' The article is called 'Potelet from 1811 to 1821.' Chatelet will be a byword, a name for the type of courtiers who deny their benefactor and rally to the Bourbons. When I have done with him, I am going ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... oath at table; and this sort of disregard does not usually stop at the elementary decencies. It is true that on Mulfera the bark of the bachelor was something worse than his bite, and his tongue no fair criterion to the rest of him. Nevertheless, the place became a byword, even in the back-blocks; and when at last the good Bishop Methuen had the hardihood to include it in an episcopal itinerary, there were admirers of that dear divine who roundly condemned his folly, and enemies who no longer ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... this political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and byword down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... Manfred and his companions our travelers continue their way upward until they reach a broad ledge cut out in the side of the mountain. While resting here Dante sees a spirit whom he recognizes as Balaqua, a maker of musical instruments, whose laziness was a byword in Florence. Our poet who knew the man intimately had often upbraided him for his indolence. It is said that to excuse himself in the days of his mortal life, Balaqua quoted a line of Aristotle: "By sitting down and resting the soul is rendered wise," to which Dante retorted: "Certainly ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... will be difficult to get away. The weather has turned very wet again this evening. We have only had two or three fine days in as many months. The wind howls day and night, and the place is so well known for it that "vent de Furnes" is a byword. No doubt the floods protect us, so one mustn't ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... less queer you should be saying that: for, as everybody knows, that used to be the favorite byword of your namesake the famous Count Manuel who is so newly ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... Berkshire, who pub. Poems on Various Subjects and Alfred, an Epic, translated the Poetics of Aristotle, and was Poet Laureate from 1790. In the last capacity he wrote official poems of ludicrous dulness, and was generally a jest and a byword in ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... painful in the speaking, and regrets must be uttered by me which could not certainly be shared by him. "I am broken down and trampled upon, and all the glory is departed from my name, and I have become a byword and a reproach rather than a term of honour in which future ages may rejoice, because I have been unable to carry out my long-cherished purpose by—depositing you, and insuring at least your departure!" And then Crasweller would ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... a byword in Falmouth; yet, strange to say, her victims kept a sneaking fondness for her, a soft spot In their hearts; while as sporting onlookers we boys took something like a fearful pride in the Warrior, as we called her. It was not in her nature to encourage ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... byword among the Whig families at home (who, by intermarrying, had learned to gauge another's weaknesses), that "the Pett medal showed ill in reverse." Miss Diana had heard the saying. As a Vyell—the Vyells were, before all things, critical—she knew it to ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... admired Pauline, and I looked to her to become the mother of my children; but we could neither of us endure the other's presence for any length of time without a squabble, so that our domestic infelicity became a jest and a byword even among our servants. In these circumstances I felt it would be better that we should part. It is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I was convinced that I would regard Pauline with more kindly feelings if ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck made to the prosperity ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... kinsmen in Decatur when the advance of our army brought them within our lines before they were aware of it. When asked why not stay with their friends till the armies should move away, they answered that they were sure they could not endure the rigors of the climate! The phrase became a byword at our headquarters, where we were longing for the invigorating breezes ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... to smile, But never sees the shadow in her eyes His hounds are beaten till they scarce draw breath, And then caressed beyond the worth of hounds. His vassals know not if, from day to day, He will approve, or strike them with a curse. His humours are the byword of the court, And, were it not for his good-heartedness, His prowess, and undaunted strength at arms, Men would speak lightly of him in disdain; He is so often in a stormy rage, Or supplicating humour to atone,— Too petty to repent ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... institutions in which she surpassed all others beyond question was her corruption. I have seen in the State in the Union foremost in power and wealth four judges of her courts impeached for corruption, and the political administration of her chief city become a disgrace and a byword throughout the world. I have seen the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the House rise in his place and demand the expulsion of four of his associates for making sale of their official ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... has been much irritation in spite of these promises, cumulative irritation, which however might have remained submerged had it not been for the revelations of the acts of Count Luxburg, which have made the expression "spurlos versekt" a byword. This exhibition of callous plotting against Argentine lives immediately resulted in the handing of passports to the German Ambassador to Argentina, and during the third week in September both houses ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... poisonous variety of him. In his Renaissance guise, whether projected upon actual history, as in the person of Richard III, or strutting sublimated through Marlowe's blank verse, he spared at any rate to sentimentalise his brutality. Our forefathers summed him up in the byword that an Italianate Englishman was a devil incarnate; but he had the grace of being Italianate. It is from the Germanised avatar—the Bismarck of the 'Ems telegram,' with his sentimentalising historians and ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... at our sides ere this business is finished, when we shall not be content, I'll warrant, with shutting these homes of vice, as Cromwell did, but we shall not leave one stone upon another, and shall sow the spot with salt, that it may be a hissing and a byword amongst the people.' ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for. Some experience, which would be nothing but a hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about—one, perhaps, which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of—has put him temporarily at the world's mercy. They made him a nine days' wonder, a byword. And that, my dear Danton, is just where we come in. We know the man himself; and it is to be our privilege to act as a buffer-state, to be intermediaries between him and the rest of this deadly, craving, sheepish world—for the time being; oh yes, just for the time ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... offender, the great felon himself, the author of his shame, the villain who poured in the fire of perdition upon his heart, who blasted his hopes, crumbled into ruin all his schemes of ambition for his daughter, and turned her very name into a byword of pollution and guilt. This was the man whom he was now about to get into his power; the man who, besides, had on a former occasion bearded and insulted him to his teeth;—the skulking adventurer afraid to disclose his name—the low-born impostor, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... for military operations, were gliding by as tranquilly as if there were not a great war on hand, and still the citizen at home read each morning in his newspaper the stereotyped bulletin, "All quiet on the Potomac;" the phrase passed into a byword and a sneer. By this time, too, to a nation which had not European standards of excellence, the army seemed to have reached a high state of efficiency, and to be abundantly able to take the field. Why did not its commander move? Amid all the drilling and band-playing the ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... the fate which seemed to have already overtaken Bosnia and Herzegovina; when gallant little Montenegro was already shut out from the sea by the octopus-like grip of Dalmatia crouching along her western shore; when Turkey was dwindling down to almost ineptitude; when Greece was almost a byword, and when Albania as a nation—though still nominally subject—was of such unimpaired virility that there were great possibilities of her future, it was imperative that something must happen if the Balkan race ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... he was there. He had wedged the crowd silently, gradually, till he reached the spot he had quitted soon after our entrance, to greet his former class mates. I knew by his countenance that he had heard all, and a sick, deadly feeling came over me. He, to hear my mother's name made a byword and reproach, myself alluded to as the indigent daughter of an outcast,—he, who seemed already lifted as high above me on the eagle wings of fortune, as the eyry of the king-bird is above the nest of the swallow,—it was more ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... wisely, decreed it otherwise." And herewith, lying upon his back, looking up through the quivering green of leaves, he told mad tales of a reckless Prince, of the placid Brummel, of the "Dashing" Vibart, the brilliant Sheridan, of Fox, and Grattan, and many others, whose names are now a byword one way or the other. He recounted a story of wild prodigality, of drunken midnight orgies, of days and nights over the cards, of wine, women, and horses. But, lastly and very reverently, he spoke of a woman, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... now I am become the song of these! Yea, I am become their byword! They loathe me, they flee far from me, And withhold ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... bowed him, sorrowing, I heard a great Voice pealing through the heavens, A Voice that dwarfed earth's thunders to a moan:— Woe! Woe! Woe!—to him by whom this came. His house shall unto him be desolate. And, to the end of time, his name shall be A byword and reproach in all the lands He rapined ... And his own shall curse him For the ruin that he brought. Who without reason draws the sword— By sword shall perish! The Lord hath said ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... in which the young man exemplified so uncommon an height of friendship, he had soon obtained in the castle the character of as odd and silly a fellow as his master. Indeed they were both the byword, laughing-stock, and ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... purely the work of imagination as Middleton's "Witch," or the Hags in "Macbeth," or in Goethe's 'Faust.' Horace used Canidia as a byword for all that was hateful in the creatures of her craft, filthy as they were in their lives and odious in their persons. His literary and other friends were as familiar with her name in this sense as we are ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... from their very hearts for a complete disintegration—the more thorough, for them, the better. They could never expect to command the ship, and so they are willing to wreck her, in the hope of each securing a fragment. Ruined in character in the eyes of all honest men, their names a byword for treason, and in most cases for literal crimes, political outcasts of the stamp who are said to vibrate between the legislature and the penitentiary, these desperadoes are now working with all their might to mass the cowardice of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... smart frock and a superlatively becoming hat, smiling gaily, just stepping out of a magnificent white motor car, resting her hand familiarly on that of the most successful young financier in Paris, whose conquests among women of the world were a byword, and chaperoned by a flighty little Neapolitan teacher of singing. Truly, if some one had deliberately rubbed the back of his neck with a large lump of ice on that warm spring day, the chill could not have been more effectual. Morally speaking, Lushington caught a ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... stain, blot, spot, blur, stigma, brand, reproach, imputation, slur. crying shame, burning shame; scandalum magnatum[Lat], badge of infamy, blot in one's escutcheon; bend sinister, bar sinister; champain[obs3], point champain[obs3]; byword of reproach; Ichabod. argumentum ad verecundiam[Lat]; sense of shame &c. 879. V. be inglorious &c. adj.; incur disgrace &c. n.; have a bad name, earn a bad name; put a halter round one's neck, wear a halter ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... woman, no! I spoke the truth. Haven't I shamed myself enough already— That you must call me liar! (To ELIZA) Speak out now, If you're not tongue-tied: tell her all you ken— How I'm a byword among honest women, And yet, no liar. You'd tongue enough just now To tell me what I was—a cruel tongue Cracking about my ears: and have you none To answer your son's wife, and save the lad ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... own account a memorable man. He had inaugurated the first conventicle, and had ever since been zealous in promoting them and officiating at them among the wild hills and moorlands of the western shires, till his name had become a byword among the soldiers for his courage in braving and his skill in evading them. But though one of the most resolute and indefatigable of the ministers of the Covenant, he was also one of the most moderate and ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... is, March's carpenters and fishermen refused to fight, though reenforcements joined them halfway home and they made a second attempt on Port Royal in August. March returned to Boston heartbroken, for his name had become a byword to the mob, and he was greeted in the streets with shouts of ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... it thou that hast turned my son's spirit into water? Is it thy love that hath made his name a byword among those who should love him because he is not as he once was—a man no one could meet in arms and overcome? Is it thou that hath sunk him in slothfulness, so that the wolfish lords and tyrant barons upon his marchlands begin to creep out of their castleholds, and tear and ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... time I had given up all thought of diplomacy. 'Very well, you yellow-faced devil, you will hear my answer. I would not take my freedom from you, though I were to be boiled alive. I know you for a traitor to the white man's cause, a dirty I.D.B. swindler, whose name is a byword among honest men. By your own confession you are a traitor to this idiot rising. You murdered the Dutchmen and God knows how many more, and you would fain have murdered me. I pray to Heaven that the men whose ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... laid upon Huon by the implacable and doting Emperor is nothing less than that which afterwards was made a byword for all impossible enterprises—"to take the Great Turk by the beard." He is to go to Babylon and, literally, to beard the Admiral there, and carry off the Admiral's daughter. The audience is led away ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... to look for a little while at this Nero, whose name has deservedly passed into a byword for heartless bestiality. In the year 64 he is 27 years of age, and has been seated on the throne for ten years. Four years more are to elapse before he perishes with the cry, "What an artist the world is losing!" In his early years ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... fact resolved on a far more terrible vengeance; and the Chief-Justice Jeffreys, a man of great natural powers but of violent temper, was sent to earn the Seals by a series of judicial murders which have left his name a byword for cruelty. Three hundred and fifty rebels were hanged in what has ever since, been known as the "Bloody Circuit," while Jeffreys made his way through Dorset and Somerset. More than eight hundred were sold ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... impracticable virtue. Where enthusiasts are ready to destroy or to be destroyed for trifles magnified into importance by a squeamish conscience, it is not strange that the very name of conscience should become a byword of contempt to cool ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... law. Otherwise he may find unpleasant surprises in store for him. Had Mr. Mercer made it his business to acquire some rudiments of this useful knowledge, he would never have undergone that outrageous official ill-treatment which has become a byword in the annals of international amenities. And if these strictures be considered too severe, let us see what Italians themselves have to say. In 1900 was published a book called "La Quistione Meridionale" (What's Wrong with the South), that throws a flood of light upon ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... future Finnemore was treated with a little more respect. The Sixth decided that dances did not pay, and so contented themselves with less noisy but little less aggravating amusements. For instance, Finnemore's hatred of Browning was a byword; so one day the entire form decided to learn The Lost Leader for repetition. For a while Finnemore bore it patiently, but when a burly chemistry specialist walked up to within two feet of him and began to bawl so loudly that his ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... strange that Roman courage became a byword. The fibre of Rome was toughened by perpetual strain of conflict. Even while she was struggling with Gaul and with the memories of the Carthaginian wars still fresh at Rome, the Goths were at her gates—their ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the elder Leopardi, but adopted and promoted by the archbishop, was devoted to maintaining the righteousness of all that system of extreme despotism, oath-breaking, defiance of national sentiment, and violations of ordinary decency, which had made the kingdom of Naples a byword during so many generations. Therein patriotism was proved to be a delusion; popular education an absurdity; observance of the monarch's sworn word opposition to divine law; a constitution a mere plaything in the monarch's ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... hearing of some ten or twelve spectators, mostly townsmen of Troy; and these, turning their heads, for a moment not believing their ears, stared speechlessly at the two men whose friendship had in six months passed into a local byword. Cap'n Hocken and Gap'n Hunken—what, quarrelling? No, no—nonsense: it must ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... replied Aram, "which gave to the character of Cicero its poorest and most frivolous infirmity? Has it not made him, glorious as he is despite of it, a byword in the mouths of every schoolboy? Wherever you mention his genius, do you not hear ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... him for these negative virtues. He was not known to be immoral, but he was for ever playing with this girl or the other, smiling, mincing, toying, and it all came to nothing. A very unpleasant creature was Mr. Charlie Colston, a byword with women in Eastthorpe, even amongst the nursery-maids. Mrs. Furze knew all about his youth; but she brought out her philosopher's stone and used it with effect. She did not intend to mate Catharine with a fool, and make her miserable. If she could not have persuaded ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... you be a thing to be shuddered at, a woman without a name, a byword for shame for ever?" Madame Staubach had been interrupted in her statement as to the belief entertained in respect to Linda's journey by herself and her two colleagues, and did not recur to that special point in her narrative. When Linda made no ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... and glared at him as from a great distance, sneering rather at herself than him and using that old byword of Luella's: ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... political villainy of Cuba, her daily importation of slaves, her breaches of treaty, and the bribery of her all but royal governor, are known to all men. But Canada is not dishonest; Canada is no byword for anything evil; Canada eats her own bread in the sweat of her brow, and fears a bad word from no man. True. But why does New York, with its suburbs boast a million of inhabitants, while Montreal has 85,000? Why has that babe in years, Chicago, 120,000, while Toronto has not ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... himself scarlet and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue to nod; they are strangely at peace, they know all he has to say; ring the old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell and it cannot startle their composure. And so with this byword about the letter and the spirit. It is quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man of us. Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less: that while the spirit is true, the ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when from his rifled palace on one of the devastated hills of Rome he looked out upon the Christian world, pillaged, sacked, overrun with barbarians, full of untold calamities,—order and law crushed; literature and art prostrate; justice a byword; murders and assassinations unavenged; central power destroyed; vice, in all its enormities, vulgarities, and obscenities, rampant and multiplying itself; false opinions gaining ground; soldiers turned into banditti, and senators into slaves; ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... Jamaica under English sanction until after the peace with Spain in 1670, resorted to Charleston, New York, Providence, or Boston, and under licenses granted by royal governors joined hands with the colonial free-trader or East Indian "interlopers" to make the acts of trade a byword and a reproach. New England and Dutch merchants, "regarding neither the acts of trade nor the law of nature," carried provisions to Canada during the French wars. Tobacco was taken to Holland and Scotland, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... observers hit upon the abstract principle of "Liberty" as the keynote of Americanism, interpreting this justly esteemed principle as anything from Bolshevism to the right to drink 2.75 per cent. beer. "Opportunity" is another favourite byword, and one which is certainly not without real significance. The synonymousness of "America" and "opportunity" has been inculcated into many a young head of the present generation by Emerson via Montgomery's "Leading Facts of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... die to bring the flooding of the Nile—to make fertile all the Egyptian fields. If I answer not to the voices that call me, my name will be a byword wherever the rays of the sun-God fall. Another than I will go clothed in the dazzling robe. Another will hear the shouting of the multitude. Another will ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... he escaped. When that happened the story couldn't be hushed any longer. The press was informed, the people were warned. He became known as the Mad Menace. The police and secret service organizations of the world searched for him. His name became a byword. Where had he gone? What would he do? What was his scheme? For he was still the astounding scientific genius. That portion of his mind was untouched. At the time of his escape the physicians in charge of the case assured the press that Fraser's ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... others do; (None ever did that I've heard tell of;) My passion was a byword through The town she was, of course, the ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... the Ramayana. The story of his devotion to his elder brother Rama and his brother's wife Sita, has become a byword. ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... Cinna called the assembly together to repeal the acts which Sylla had forced on them. Sylla, it is to be remembered, had as yet won no victories, nor was expected to win victories. He was the favorite of the Senate, and the Senate had become a byword for incapacity and failure. Again, as so many times before, the supremacy of the aristocrats had been accompanied with dishonor abroad and the lawless murder of political adversaries at home. No true lover of his country ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... watches, I guess. As for the company—no longer were they obliged to wrestle with the problem of getting their goods known, because from one end of our country to the other, as well as far overseas, their watches became a byword." The old Scotchman stopped as if tired with telling his ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... machinery in order to coerce unfortunate masters to pay higher wages than they can afford, is climaxed by those brigand processions of idle roughs who go about bawling, "We've no work to do, and wouldn't do it if we had." The British workman (of course with many exceptions) has become a byword for everything unpleasant, which both large contractors and small employers avoid if they can: drink, bank holidays, radical spouters, the conceit of being better than their betters, and above all that ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... fortune which raises us in the world removes us farther from truth, because we are most afraid of wounding those whose affection is most useful and whose dislike is most dangerous. A prince may be the byword of all Europe, and he alone will know nothing of it. I am not astonished. To tell the truth is useful to those to whom it is spoken, but disadvantageous to those who tell it, because it makes them disliked. Now those who live with princes love their own ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... that your coachman,—that is the man who was before me,—gave you, in the dark, a good sound drubbing, of which you said nothing. In short, what is the use of going on? We can go nowhere but we are sure to hear you pulled to pieces. You are the butt and jest and byword of everybody; and never does anyone mention you but under the names of miser, stingy, mean, ...
— The Miser (L'Avare) • Moliere
... fiddlestick! you ought to be ashamed to show your face at the sessions: you'll be a laughing-stock to the whole bench, and a byword with all the pig-tailed lawyers and bag-wigged attorneys ...
— St. Patrick's Day • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... bit of tin and horn; I'm a byword, I'm a plaything, I'm a jest; The virtuoso looks on me with scorn; But there's times when I am better than the best. Ask the stoker and the sailor of the sea; Ask the mucker and the hewer of the pine; Ask the herder of the plain, ask the gleaner of the grain— There's a lowly, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... comfortable chairs, flushed from odd nooks and corners, baited openly in saloon and reading-room, trailed as with the wile of the serpent along devious passageways and through crowded assemblages, hare to her hound, up and down, high and low, until he became a byword among his companions for the stricken eye of eternal watchfulness. Sometimes the persecutress stalked him, unarmed; anon she threatened with a five-dollar bill. Now she trailed in a deadly silence; again, when there were few to hear, she bayed softly upon the spoor, and ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... combine effectively for achievement of a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great results. Poland and certain republics of the Western Hemisphere are the standard examples of failure of this kind; and the United States would have ranked with them, and her name would have become a byword of derision, if the forces of union had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the growth of soft luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes a national danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the vision of a seer to foretell what ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... of Hate, accompanied on the timbrel by Miriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes is a byword. "We utterly destroyed every city," Deuteronomy declares; "the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil of the cities." David, who ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... city," afterwards expostulated with the doctor for this rough interruption: "Now, sir," said he, "was not that rude?" The full rudeness is only apparent when we remember that Brentford was in that day a byword for dreariness and dirt—Thomson in the Castle of Indolence calls it "a town of mud." When Johnson visited Glasgow, however, he joined the troop of its admirers himself, and Boswell took the opportunity to put him then in mind of his question ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... the circumjacent parishes, it was thought a gowk's errand; but no sooner was the coal reached, but up sprung such a traffic, that it was a godsend to the parish, and the opening of a trade and commerce, that has, to use an old byword, brought gold in gowpins amang us. From that time my stipend has been on the regular increase, and therefore I think that the incoming of the heritors must have been ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... ripe, rich nuts. Life was becoming a little easier for Wahb. He was gaining in health and strength, and the creatures he daily met now let him alone. But as he feasted on the pinons one morning after a gale, a great Blackbear came marching down the hill. "No one meets a friend in the woods," was a byword that Wahb had learned already. He swung up the nearest tree. At first the Blackbear was scared, for he smelled the smell of Grizzly; but when he saw it was only a cub, he took courage and came growling at Wahb. He could climb as well as the little Grizzly, ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Thompson Seton
... caution, that with us the most munificent charity is unable to check the accumulation of evil, moral and physical, with which it vainly endeavours to contend? How is it, that while the wealth of England is a proverb among nations, the distress of her labourers is a byword no less universal; that while her commerce encircles the globe, while her colonies are spread through both hemispheres, while regions hitherto unknown are but the resting-place of her never-ceasing enterprise, the producers of all this wealth, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... mountains, jeers and taunts of derision could be found in plenty in the columns of California newspapers. "The Dutch Flat Swindle," as the road was termed by some of these far sighted journalists—when the Company was laboring to overcome the heavy grade near that town—has passed into a byword in California, and now is suggestive of success. The route, after the "summit" was gained, was then comparatively easy, and rapid progress was made. The Chinese laborers, who had worked on the road from first to last, drove the work forward, ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... inauguration of his successor. He had remained at his desk until midnight of the previous day signing appointments which would deprive Jackson of so much more patronage. Jackson took his revenge by the instant removal of 167 political opponents. His remark, "To the victor belong the spoils," became a byword of American politics. The system of rotation in office ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... trapped, meshed in a web of damning circumstance; everything was against her—appearances, the hands of all men, the cruel accident that had placed the necklace in her keeping, even her parentage. For she was the daughter of a notorious thief, a man whose name was an international byword. Who would believe her protestations of innocence—presuming that the police should find her before she could reach either ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... 'Philanthropist' has suffered the same fate as many other words in our language. It has become hackneyed and corrupted; it has taken a professional taint; it has almost become a byword. We are apt to think of the philanthropist as an excitable, contentious creature, at the mercy of every fad, an ultra-radical in politics, craving for notoriety, filled with self-confidence, and meddling with other people's business. ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... fear that in the end he may be forced to give it all up, to the great scandal and reproach of the French name, which by such conduct is made a laughing-stock and a byword among the nations. For as though their wish was to oppose the conversion of these poor Western peoples, and the glory of God and of the King, we find a set of men full of avarice and envy, who would not draw a sword in the service ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... bide his time. It would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible, the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer, and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain persons, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of other people and of his youth, making his tales as fanciful as possible, choosing deliberately to foster the merry humor in which they had been all day. He told her of his father, the crotchety old soldier, whose absurd sense of duty and whose elaborate Southern courtesy had become a byword in the South. He told her household tales that were prized like pieces of the Burrell plate, beautiful heirlooms of sentiment that mark the honor of high-blooded houses; following which there was ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... of a motive, but rather to the innate caution of the hill farmer; and doubtless, also, to a natural awe of the unwonted splendour with which they were surrounded. In a brief time his kindly hospitality became a byword in the capital, and fabulous accounts of it were carried home at week ends to toiling wives and sons and daughters, to incredulous citizens who sat on cracker boxes and found the Sunday papers stale and unprofitable for weeks thereafter. The geraniums—the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... His wealth became a byword. And later, when, out of disorder and vice, the city of Leaping Horse grew to capital importance, he became surfeited with the accumulations of wealth which rolled in upon him ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... By all means drive Expletives from our highways; They are the ruin of our roads, The byword of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... Pak Chung Chang, falling on his knees. "It is impossible! It is impossible! You cannot strike off my father's nose. He cannot go down without his nose to the grave. He will become a laughter and a byword, and all my days and nights will be filled with woe. O reflect! Report that you have seen no such nose in your travels. You, too, have ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... no less queer you should be saying that: for, as everybody knows, that used to be the favorite byword of your namesake the famous Count Manuel who is so newly dead in ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... menaces but even insult;[227] being ignorant in what direction to turn her steps, lest she should throw herself into the power of her arch-enemy. Her proud heart was bruised; her great name had become a byword and a scorn; the wife and the mother of kings, before whose frown the high-born and the powerful had once shrunk, sat shivering in the vast halls of a foreign palace, shrinking beneath the hoarse cries of a hostile multitude, and quailing in ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... and worship them: 7. Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house which I have hallowed for My name, will I cast out of My sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people: 8. And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done thus unto this land, and to this house? 9. And they shall answer, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... account a memorable man. He had inaugurated the first conventicle, and had ever since been zealous in promoting them and officiating at them among the wild hills and moorlands of the western shires, till his name had become a byword among the soldiers for his courage in braving and his skill in evading them. But though one of the most resolute and indefatigable of the ministers of the Covenant, he was also one of the most moderate and sensible. Had no one among them been ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... slays one hundred thousand a year, and causes ten thousand murders every year, steals the vittles and clothes from starvin' wimmen and children, has its deadly grip on Church and State, and makes our civilization and Christianity a mock and byword amongst them that think." ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... the story couldn't be hushed any longer. The press was informed, the people were warned. He became known as the Mad Menace. The police and secret service organizations of the world searched for him. His name became a byword. Where had he gone? What would he do? What was his scheme? For he was still the astounding scientific genius. That portion of his mind was untouched. At the time of his escape the physicians in charge of the case assured ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... abdicate! Renounce Olympus! lavish here on him Thy pity and thy care! he may perchance Make thee his wife—at least his paramour! But thither go not I! foul shame it were Again to share his bed; the dames of Troy Will for a byword hold me; and e'en now My soul ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... Sidonia! for thou art a byword amongst the people. Woe to thee, Sidonia! for thou hast passed thy youth in wantonness and thy old age in sin. Woe to thee, Sidonia! for thy hellish arts brought thy mother the abbess, and thy father the superintendent, nearly to their graves. Woe to thee, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... best of all possible worlds. It may be so, but it remains a pity that no better was possible. And Mrs. Grundy herself seems to me as over-abused as marriage. The celerity with which she became a byword, from the moment she made her accidental appearance in Tom Morton's 'Speed the Plough,' shows how the popular instinct needed some such incarnation of our neighbours' opinions. She stands, the representative of the ethical level of the age, not of fixed pruderies. She is by no means ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... never sees the shadow in her eyes His hounds are beaten till they scarce draw breath, And then caressed beyond the worth of hounds. His vassals know not if, from day to day, He will approve, or strike them with a curse. His humours are the byword of the court, And, were it not for his good-heartedness, His prowess, and undaunted strength at arms, Men would speak lightly of him in disdain; He is so often in a stormy rage, Or supplicating humour to atone,— Too petty ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... rich nuts. Life was becoming a little easier for Wahb. He was gaining in health and strength, and the creatures he daily met now let him alone. But as he feasted on the pinons one morning after a gale, a great Blackbear came marching down the hill. "No one meets a friend in the woods," was a byword that Wahb had learned already. He swung up the nearest tree. At first the Blackbear was scared, for he smelled the smell of Grizzly; but when he saw it was only a cub, he took courage and came growling at Wahb. He could climb as well as the little ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Thompson Seton
... other—he who had lost the very power of trusting, and constantly sacrificed others to secure his own life, whilst they counted not their lives dear to them in comparison with their truth to their word, and love to one another. No wonder that Damon and Pythias have become such a byword that they seem too well known to have their story told here, except that a name in everyone's mouth sometimes seems to be mentioned by those who have forgotten or never heard the tale attached ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... popular public man during the reconstruction period, was endeavoring to arouse the people. Governor Brown's apostasy was unfortunate. No man was then more execrated by the people who had honored him. His name, for a while, was a byword and a reproach. Mr. Stephens defended his position as conscientious if not consistent, and gave Governor Brown the credit for the purity as well as the courage of his convictions. Governor Brown bore the contumely with patience. He contended that he could best serve the ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... himself became head of the government he changed his tactics and called his journal L'Homme Libre again. In the Chamber he announced that "publicity for the 'debates' of the Conference was generally favored," but in practice he rendered the system of gagging the press a byword in Europe. Drawing his own line of demarcation between the permissible and the illicit, he informed the Chamber that so long as the Conference was engaged on its arduous work "it must not be said that the head of one government had put forward a proposal ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the sway of Right over Might. But it is obvious that in a world which has long ceased to be merely European, the European Powers cannot long continue with impunity such internecine strife, and that unless some real shape and substance can be given to the Concert of Europe—so long and so justly a byword among all thinking men—our continent (and with it these islands) will inevitably forfeit the leadership which has hitherto been theirs and surrender the direction of the world's affairs into the hands of the extra-European powers. It will be remembered ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... years before by the elder Leopardi, but adopted and promoted by the archbishop, was devoted to maintaining the righteousness of all that system of extreme despotism, oath-breaking, defiance of national sentiment, and violations of ordinary decency, which had made the kingdom of Naples a byword during so many generations. Therein patriotism was proved to be a delusion; popular education an absurdity; observance of the monarch's sworn word opposition to divine law; a constitution a mere plaything in the monarch's hands; the Bible is steadily quoted in behalf ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... enemies. I am none of Henry's deputy; I am his foe; I have more mind to conquer than to govern, to meet him in the field than to serve him in office. If all the hearts of England and Ireland that have cause thereto would join in this quarrel, as I trust they will, then should he be a byword, as I trust he shall, for his heresy, lechery, and tyranny; wherein the age to come may score him among the ancient princes of most abominable and hateful memory."[331] "With that," says Campion, "he rendered up his sword, adding to his shameful oration many other ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... unpleasant surprises in store for him. Had Mr. Mercer made it his business to acquire some rudiments of this useful knowledge, he would never have undergone that outrageous official ill-treatment which has become a byword in the annals of international amenities. And if these strictures be considered too severe, let us see what Italians themselves have to say. In 1900 was published a book called "La Quistione Meridionale" (What's Wrong with the South), that throws a flood of light upon local conditions. It contains ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... debased or had become wholly obsolete. Such new-fangled words as "eftsoon," "albeit," "wench," "soothly," "zounds," "whenas," and "sithence" had stolen into common usage, making more direct and simpler speech a jest and a byword. ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... is it thou that hast turned my son's spirit into water? Is it thy love that hath made his name a byword among those who should love him because he is not as he once was—a man no one could meet in arms and overcome? Is it thou that hath sunk him in slothfulness, so that the wolfish lords and tyrant barons upon his marchlands ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... dumpy: A flowing cape it's certain will Well—not become one short and stumpy. Yet since, although you are not tall, You wear a cape, you may take my word That in the mouths of one and all You have become a very byword. ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... within our lines before they were aware of it. When asked why not stay with their friends till the armies should move away, they answered that they were sure they could not endure the rigors of the climate! The phrase became a byword at our headquarters, where we were longing for the invigorating breezes ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... soldier off on the battle front blessed the makers of these watches, I guess. As for the company—no longer were they obliged to wrestle with the problem of getting their goods known, because from one end of our country to the other, as well as far overseas, their watches became a byword." The old Scotchman stopped as if tired ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... of my fault." But the maiden answered, "Your pleadings and your repentance come too late, and nothing can help you more. I dare not overlook your offence, for that would bring me disgrace, and make me a byword among the people. Twice have you sinned against me: for, firstly, you have despised my love; and, secondly, you have stolen my ring; and now you must suffer your punishment." As she spoke, she placed the ring on the thumb of her left hand, took the man on her arm like a doll, and ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... lost children has been cleared up, and, living or dead—God forbid it should prove to be the latter!—they are restored to their parents. Now, mark my words, Count, unless my child Elizabeth is found, I'll make your name a byword throughout the length and breadth of the country—I'll——"; but words failed him, and, shaking his fist, he staggered ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... went on to "I need hardly say that the fault is wholly Makar Alexievitch's." Finally it became "OF COURSE Makar Alexievitch is to blame." Do you see the sequence of things, my darling? Every mistake was attributed to me, until "Makar Alexievitch" became a byword in our department. Also, while making of me a proverb, these fellows could not give me a smile or a civil word. They found fault with my boots, with my uniform, with my hair, with my figure. None of these things were to their taste: everything ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the establishment. The clubs of the immediate neighbourhood, of which there were several, did not think it necessary to install cuisines when Delmonico's was so close at hand. The name of the house is still a byword in the land, but the names of Filippini and Lattard, two of the maitre d'hotel who helped to make Delmonico's famous, have been forgotten by all but a very few. What supper parties were given in the old establishment, and what dances of that exclusive circle to which ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... midnight of the previous day signing appointments which would deprive Jackson of so much more patronage. Jackson took his revenge by the instant removal of 167 political opponents. His remark, "To the victor belong the spoils," became a byword of American politics. The system of rotation in ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... through the quivering green of leaves, he told mad tales of a reckless Prince, of the placid Brummel, of the "Dashing" Vibart, the brilliant Sheridan, of Fox, and Grattan, and many others, whose names are now a byword one way or the other. He recounted a story of wild prodigality, of drunken midnight orgies, of days and nights over the cards, of wine, women, and horses. But, lastly and very reverently, he spoke of a woman, of her love, and faith, and deathless trust. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... "Italian! that is their mean yet mighty byword of reproach—the watchword with which they assassinated, hanged, and made away with Concini; and if I gave them their way they would assassinate, hang, and make away with me in the same manner, although they have nothing to complain of except a tax ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... She could, of course, have handed him over to the nearest gendarme; but that meant arrest, and arrest meant exposure. At their home in Vienna, let me tell you, baccarat had been played nightly as a pastime for their guests. So great was her luck that 'As lucky as the Baronne Frontignac' was a byword. Frontignac's price was this: she must take his fifty louis and play that stake at the Casino that night; when she brought him ten ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... cause I came, and I have stayed to look upon the face of her whose beauty had power to drive the thought of me from the heart of Odysseus, and bring him, who of all men was the greatest hero and the foremost left alive, to do a dastard deed and make his mighty name a byword and a scorn. Knowest thou, Meriamun, that I find the matter strange, since if all else be false, yet is this true, that among women the fairest are the most strong. Thou art fair indeed, Meriamun, ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... hatless, and had he not caught cold and been carried off by pneumonia, would have spread his hatless gospel, rendering the name of Knox the Hatter infamous, and causing the word "Derby" to be henceforth a byword ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... Heaven's mere grace, not by our prowess done: Those conquests were achieved by wondrous ways, If now from that directed course we run The God of Battles thus before us lays, His loving kindness shall we lose, I doubt, And be a byword to ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... brother's children, redoubled his attentions to him, and said, "Did they give you any letter?" Mazin replied, "Yes." He eagerly exclaimed, "Give it to me." He gave it him, when he opened it, read it to himself, and considered the contents word byword. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... personalities which she flung at random about the table. Knowing no social distinctions, Susie was no respecter of persons. She chaffed and flouted the man who wintered a thousand head of cattle with the same impartiality with which she gibed his blushing cowpuncher. Her good-nature was a byword, as were her generosity and boyish daring. Susie MacDonald was a local celebrity in her way, and on the big hay-ranch her lightest ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... his cloth. There was ever a fire to extinguish at his throat, nor could he veil his wanton eye at the sight of a pretty wench. Again and again the lust of preaching urged him to repent, yet he slid back upon his past gaiety, until Parson Pureney became a byword. Dismissed from Newmarket in disgrace, he wandered the country up and down in search of a pulpit, but so infamous became the habit of his life that only in prison could he find an ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... in the wide, wide world—there are none to protect—none to care for me now! My father sleeps by Manuel's side, in the churchyard, and I am the last of my house. The name of De Garcia, once so proud and honored, will become a byword for desolation and misery! I have said cursed was the hour of my birth! and I now say blessed is the hour of my last sleep! You see me here from necessity, not choice, for all places would be alike to me now; but ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... How can it be that thou, Being a Jew, askest to drink of me Which am a woman of Samaria? You Jews despise us; have no dealings with us; Make us a byword; call us in derision The silly folk of Sychar. Sir, how is it Thou ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... talk of is the bait that covers the hook for gudgeons. You have to accept the superstition, or your beautiful life to them is a byword and a hissing. ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... a sure watch over a shameless daughter, lest she make thee a laughingstock to thine enemies, and a byword in the city, and a reproach among the people, and make thee ashamed before ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... two thousand years they had fed the nations on lies and set up images which were abhorrent to the one and only God. They had, to suit their own doctrines and dogmas, perverted the meaning of the words of Jesus; they had made the name of Christ a byword to all true believers. The sin of hate and the lust for blood, which was to fill the hearts of all Christian countries, was to be a token to all true believers that the teachings of Christians had been vain and fruitless. They had lived without God in ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... May have found their gold blasted and bloody, And tarnished by tears for the slain; And because they dishonoured their stations Were weak when they should have been strong, May be treated with scorn by the nations, A byword and hissing among. ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... have we in this narrative? When the prophet permitted Naaman to bow in the temple of Rimmon he did very right, say the chorus of commentators. But the common-sense of mankind has taken a different view. Bowing in the temple of Rimmon has become a byword and a reproach. It signifies something which men feel is not quite right. It was, in fact, an indulgence. Still, perhaps it was wise not to force the new-born convert. Perhaps it did Naaman no harm. Possibly it did Elisha's ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... Don't tell me!—Unus fiddlestick! you ought to be ashamed to show your face at the sessions: you'll be a laughing-stock to the whole bench, and a byword with all the pig-tailed lawyers ...
— St. Patrick's Day • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... are common to the most self-restrained of us, "you have been for twenty years a living lie! For twenty years you have cheated and mocked me. For twenty years—in company with a scoundrel whose name is a byword for all that is profligate and base—you have laughed at me for a credulous and hood-winked fool; and now, because I dared to raise my hand to that reckless boy, you confess your shame, and glory in ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... Louvet; his thin existence all acidified into rage, and preternatural insight of suspicion. Wroth is young Barbaroux; wroth and scornful. Silent, like a Queen with the aspic on her bosom, sits the wife of Roland; Roland's Accounts never yet got audited, his name become a byword. Such is the fortune of war, especially of revolution. The great gulf of Tophet, and Tenth of August, opened itself at the magic of your eloquent voice; and lo now, it will not close at your voice! It is a dangerous thing such magic. The Magician's Famulus got hold of the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... its Song of Hate, accompanied on the timbrel by Miriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes is a byword. "We utterly destroyed every city," Deuteronomy declares; "the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil of ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... entrance into life, so at the end there is a supernatural resumption of it. The birth corresponds with the resurrection, and both witness to the divinity. The lowly life culminates in the conquest over death; the Nazarene despised, rejected, dwelling in a place that was a byword, sharing all the modest lowliness and self-respecting poverty of the Galilean peasants, has conquered death. The Man that was crucified has conquered death. And the fact that He has risen explains and illuminates the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... I told you of dined three years ago—and a merry day they had of it. I could wish we had a few of the scraps they left. It's cold work sleeping in the open on an empty stomach, but we must just cheer each other with Tone's byword— ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... was still vigorous, and who retained their respect for established religion, could not tolerate the cynicism with which Machiavelli analyzed his subject from the merely intellectual point of view. His name became a byword. 'Am I Machiavel?' says the host in the Merry Wives of Windsor. Marlowe makes the ghost of the great Florentine speak prologue to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... of the forest, driven from their coverts by his advance. It is always convenient to have a scape-goat in case of disaster, and the German element in the Eleventh Corps have been fiercely censured and their name became a byword for giving way on this occasion. It is full time justice should be done by calling attention to the position of that corps. I assert that when a force is not deployed, but is struck suddenly and violently ...
— Chancellorsville and Gettysburg - Campaigns of the Civil War - VI • Abner Doubleday
... love as others do; (None ever did that I've heard tell of;) My passion was a byword through The town she was, of course, the ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... American may well take the ground that while there is so much snobbery shown by a certain sort of Americans abroad, it is not an unwise thing to have in each capital a man who in the intervals of his more important duties, can keep this struggling mass of folly from becoming a scandal and a byword throughout Europe. No one can know, until he has seen the inner workings of our diplomatic service, how much duty of this kind is quietly done by our representatives, and how many things are thus ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... maintained. You fellows may protest and run to Washington, and you may send your paid representatives there, but you're sure to lose. As free-range monopolists you are cumberers of the earth, and all you represent must pass, before this State can be anything but the byword it now is. I didn't feel this so keenly ten years ago, but with a bunch of children growing up my vision has grown clearer. The picturesque West must give way to the civilized West, and the war of sheepmen ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... said—"For you believe in nothing—not even in God! You are a man of your own making—you are not a man in the true sense of manhood. How can you know anything of love? You will not find it in the low haunts of Paris where you are so well known,—where your name is a byword as that of an English ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... victory, his character rose prodigiously in the estimation of all his school fellows, and the name of Figs, which had been a byword of reproach, became as respectable and popular a nickname as any other in use in the school. "After all, it's not his fault that his father's a grocer," George Osborne said, who, though a little chap, had a very high popularity among the Swishtail youth; and his ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... forces at work at blossom time; the methods adopted by the greatest masters of the form are inconsistent with the motives that impelled them to its use, and where these motives were followed to their logical conclusion, the resuit, both in literature and in life, became a byword for absurd unreality. To live at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms, pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... tame that they would sit on one's hat. They laid their eggs on pinnacles of rock without a vestige of nest, and singly. They looked just like stones. I suppose this was a protection from the land-crabs, about which you will have heard. The land-crabs of Trinidad are a byword and they certainly deserve the name, as they abound from sea-level to the top of the island. The higher up the bigger they were. The surface of the hills and valleys was covered with loose boulders, and the whole island being of volcanic ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... self-reliance. Awaiting at every step an impulse from their adored leader, growing timid in the moment when decision was imperative, they did not prove equal to their task. Without his people Paoli was still a philosopher; without him they became in succeeding years a byword, and fell supinely into the arms of a less noble subjection. In this regard the comparison between him and Washington, so often ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... magazine you have been looking for. It is edited by none other than A. V. Harding, whose name is a byword in the sporting field. Each monthly issue contains 64 to 100 pages chock-full of interesting articles, illustrated with actual photos on FUR FARMING, HUNTING, FISHING, etc. Each issue also has many departments—The Gun Rack; Dogs; Fur Raising; ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... native population, Resht contains about five hundred Armenians, and a score or so of Europeans. Among the latter are a Russian and a British vice-consul. To the residence of the latter we repaired. Colonel Stewart's kindness and hospitality are a byword in Persia, and the Sunday of our arrival at Resht was truly a day of rest after the discomfort and privations we had undergone since ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... Roman courage became a byword. The fibre of Rome was toughened by perpetual strain of conflict. Even while she was struggling with Gaul and with the memories of the Carthaginian wars still fresh at Rome, the Goths were at her gates—their blows directed ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... gesture which had made his name a byword where Babe himself was unknown, he pulled his six-shooter from its holster and shot Tubbs through the head. He fell his length, like a bundle of blankets, and, even as he dropped, Babe was in the ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... in a state of religious indifference, just so long will the war continue; and just so soon as we give our lives to Him, and put our trust in Him, just so soon will victory be seen. God has other ways of speaking than by big guns. God spoke, and lo, all the pomp of the Czars became the byword of children! God will speak again, and all the vain glory of the Kaiser will become as the fairy stories ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... were my affinity. But for years I had been looking for a woman almost your exact opposite. You are dark. Three days ago I couldn't have imagined myself marrying anyone who was not fair. Your eyes are grey. Three days ago my preference for blue eyes was a byword. You have a ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the St. Johns to the Connecticut if he had pleased; and he had servants and horses and attire such as no governor in all the provinces could boast. He built himself a fine house out of stone, and the life he led in it was a scandal and a byword everywhere. For all that, there was not a man to be found who had not a good word to say for Willan Blaycke, and not a woman who did not look pleased and smile if he so much as spoke to her. He was generous, ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... rudder with all her might—she had already made one mistake, tumbling head over heels in love with a young fellow who had mortified her before the world when their engagement was less than a few months old, making her name and affections a byword, and she could not and would not repeat the blunder. This had shattered her customary self-reliance, leaving her wellnigh helpless. Perhaps after all—an unheard-of thing in her experience—she had better ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... it is thine to command, and whatso thou orderest us that we will do. Thou knowest that in this affair is dishonour and disgrace to our name and to thine, and haply the islanders will hear of it, and we shall become amongst them a byword; wherefore it befitteth thou return us an answer with all speed." Then she delivered the letter to a courier and he carried it to the King, who, when he read it, was wroth with exceeding wrath with his daughter Manar al-Sana and wrote to Nur al-Huda, saying, "I commit her case to thee and give thee ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... again, maliciously: "Ha, it is the Ortegna face she has; and that Ortegna, why, he was the scandal byword of the whole coast. There was not a decent woman would have spoken to him, except for ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... superficial observers hit upon the abstract principle of "Liberty" as the keynote of Americanism, interpreting this justly esteemed principle as anything from Bolshevism to the right to drink 2.75 per cent. beer. "Opportunity" is another favourite byword, and one which is certainly not without real significance. The synonymousness of "America" and "opportunity" has been inculcated into many a young head of the present generation by Emerson via Montgomery's "Leading Facts ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... were corrupt and grasping men. They tried to wring all the money they could from their helpless subjects. To the extortions of the governors must be added those of the tax collectors, whose very name of "publican" [14] became a byword for all that was rapacious and greedy. In this first effort to manage the world she had won, Rome had certainly made a failure. A city-state could not rule, with justice ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the shirtcloak around my shoulders, pushed the door and went in. I had remembered that Rakhal was waiting for me. Not beyond this door, but at the end of the trail, behind some other door, somewhere. And we have a byword in Shainsa: A trail ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... if he were really too shocked to speak at all; "seven-ty dollars! Make it eighty! Oh, it is a sin and a shame, gentlemen, and the fair fame of this beautiful city is eternally ruined. It will become a wagging of the head and a byword among the nations. Sev-en-ty dollars!"—then hotly and indignantly—"seventy dollars!—fifth and last time, seventy dollars!"—here he ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... do not bear the open blazon of wealth upon them,—what has he done for the people? Nothing! What will he ever do for the People? Nothing! Flattered by self-seekers—stuffed with eulogy by a paid Press—his name made a byword and a mockery by the very women with whom he consorts, what should we do with him in Our work! Let him alone!—let him be! Let him eat and drink as suits his nature—and die of the poison his own vices breed in his blood!—we want naught of him, or his heirs! When the time ripens to its ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... remarkable degree, and with a praiseworthy tenacity she studied the classical works of the Chinese, and at the same time could vie with most of the women in all branches of their domestic activities. Her extraordinary ability is a byword to this day amongst the people who ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... sacrificing their principles on the altar of patriotism. Whereas the Catholic party in Belgium has for twenty-eight years refused the means of national defence, and has made the Belgian Army into a byword on the plea that barrack life is dangerous to the religious faith of the peasant, the German Catholics have voted with exemplary docility every increase of the army and navy. Only once did they dare to propose a small reduction in the estimates for the expenditure on the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... will remember that all prisoners, officers and men, will be henceforth under the charge of the medical department, and that you have full authority to make such arrangements as you may think necessary for their comfort and honourable treatment. I will not have Russia made a byword among civilized peoples.' ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... He was come of the best blood in Molokai and Maui, of a pure descent; and yet he was more white to look upon than any foreigner: his hair the colour of dry grass, and his eyes red and very blind, so that “Blind as Kalamake, that can see across to-morrow,” was a byword in ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... You were brought here for this purpose. Threats and bribes were without effect. Love might accomplish what the other two had failed to do. You know little of the ways of the world. Do you know that this house party is scandalous, for all its innocence? Do you know that Madame's name would be a byword were it known that we have been here more than two weeks, alone with two women? Who but a woman that feels herself above convention would dare offer this affront to society? Do you know why Madame the countess came? Company for Madame? No; she was to play make love to me to keep me out of the ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel. We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and byword down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... such overpowering impression. His observers, however much they have to say about his humor, his seasons of Shakespearian mirth, never forget their impression that at heart he is sad. His fondness for poetry in the minor key has become a byword, especially the line "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... nature by his silence and his sulks. The hero of this trumpery piece was of this familiar type. He saw the gay fascinator coming about his house; but he was too proud and dignified to interfere. He knew of his young wife becoming the byword of his friends; but he only clasped his hands on his forehead, and sought solitude, and scowled as a man of virtue should. Macleod had paid but little attention to stories of this kind when he had merely read them; but when the situation was visible—when ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... "the idea is a noble one—But look at the reality! Has not priestly pandering to tyrants made the Church, in every age, a scoff and a byword among free men?" ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... types of a dying feudalism, disposed to believe nothing advantageous to the community if it conflicts with any privilege of their class. Under the name of Junker, the Conservative landowners of the region of Prussia east of the Elbe, they have become everywhere a byword for pride, selfishness, in a word—reaction. They and men of their kidney are to be distinguished from the German "people" in the English sense, and hold themselves vastly superior to the burghertum, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... most munificent charity is unable to check the accumulation of evil, moral and physical, with which it vainly endeavours to contend? How is it, that while the wealth of England is a proverb among nations, the distress of her labourers is a byword no less universal; that while her commerce encircles the globe, while her colonies are spread through both hemispheres, while regions hitherto unknown are but the resting-place of her never-ceasing enterprise, the producers of all this wealth, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... mere skirmishers, but I have given them red-hot shot to-night. To-morrow you will know why we are making game of 'Potelet.' The article is called 'Potelet from 1811 to 1821.' Chatelet will be a byword, a name for the type of courtiers who deny their benefactor and rally to the Bourbons. When I have done with him, I am going to Mme. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... on the border—a sure enough bad proposition, I reckon. They say he's part Spanish and part Indian, but all pisen. Others say he's a college man of good family. I don't know about that, for nobody knows who he really is. But the name is a byword in the country. People lower their voices when they speak ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... who build it. I firmly believe this and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political structure no better than the builders of Babel; we shall be divided and confounded and we ourselves become a reproach and a byword down to future ages. And, what is worse, mankind may hereafter despair of establishing government by human wisdom and leave it ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... lifting his hat in grave gesture. "I feel like a condemned coward, my name a byword for the rabble, being here in such comparative safety, when, in honor, I should be lying ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... in May, Seigerman's name was presented. On each of three ballots he received one lone vote. When the news reached the boys in the Strip, they dubbed this one vote "Seigerman's Per Cent," meaning the worst of anything, and that expression became a byword on the range, from Brownsville, Texas, to the Milk ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... cared for nothing but his studies, satisfied with a piece of bread or a few maccaroni. When their purse was low, the old man would accompany him to the scene of his labors, and constantly urge him on, by repeating Luca, fa presto, (hurry Luca) which became a byword among the painters, and was fixed upon the young artist as a nickname, singularly appropriate to his wonderful celerity of execution. He afterwards traveled through Lombardy to Venice, still accompanied by his father, and having studied the works of ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... a terrible effect on Sancerre, and was cruelly retorted on the Sappho of Saint-Satur when, seeing her childless after five years of married life, little de la Baudraye became a byword for laughter. To understand this provincial witticism, readers may be reminded of the Bailli de Ferrette—some, no doubt, having known him—of whom it was said that he was the bravest man in Europe for daring to walk ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... oil king and iron master have been a hissing and a byword among the hot-heads in America. Yet oil king and iron master filled a world with motor lorries. The blessings these have brought to every man are more than he can measure. We mention this as one: They stopped the Germans ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... Summer, the perfect season for military operations, were gliding by as tranquilly as if there were not a great war on hand, and still the citizen at home read each morning in his newspaper the stereotyped bulletin, "All quiet on the Potomac;" the phrase passed into a byword and a sneer. By this time, too, to a nation which had not European standards of excellence, the army seemed to have reached a high state of efficiency, and to be abundantly able to take the field. Why did not its commander move? Amid all the drilling and band-playing ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... vexed at himself that he'd try to take it out on the poor clown, and cut at him with his long whip. But Mr. Clown was just as spry in his shoes as he was under the hat, and he'd hop up on the ring-side out of the way, and squall out: "A-a-aah! Never touched me!" We had that for a byword. Oh, you'd die laughing at the comical remarks he'd make. And he'd be so quick about it. The ring-master would say something, and before you'd think, the clown would make a joke out of it.... I wish I could remember ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... journalists alone be relieved of responsibility to their country? Is it possible that the Government is afraid of the press? There is no need for fear. 'Beware of Aristophanes', says Landor, 'he can cast your name as a byword to a thousand cities of Asia for a thousand years. But all that the press can do by its disfavour is to keep your name obscure in a hundred cities of England for a hundred days. Signed articles are robbed of their vague impressiveness, and are known for what they ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... a pitiful and passionate appeal in the Senate Chamber: "Romans, allies, friends! help! help! Hannibal is at the gates of our city. Hannibal, the sworn enemy of Rome. Hannibal the terrible. Hannibal who fears not the gods, neither keeps faith with men. ["Punic faith" was a byword.] O Romans, fathers, friends! help while there ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... destroying machinery in order to coerce unfortunate masters to pay higher wages than they can afford, is climaxed by those brigand processions of idle roughs who go about bawling, "We've no work to do, and wouldn't do it if we had." The British workman (of course with many exceptions) has become a byword for everything unpleasant, which both large contractors and small employers avoid if they can: drink, bank holidays, radical spouters, the conceit of being better than their betters, and above all that suicidal iniquity of strikes, seem in these latter days to have generally demoralised ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... And if you have not burnt your returned letter, pray re-send it me, as a monumental token of my stupidity. 'Twas a little unthinking of you to touch upon a sore subject. Why, by dabbling in those accursed Albums, I have become a byword of infamy all over the kingdom. I have sicken'd decent women for asking me to write in Albums. There be "dark jests" abroad, Master Cornwall; and some riddles may live to be clear'd up. And 'tis not every saddle is put on the right steed; and forgeries ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... their condition have come into collision, cannot long subsist together on a mere Poor-law. True enough:—and yet, human beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too, till something better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a byword among the nations. O, what a waste is there; of noble and thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms; valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,—which all the metal of Potosi cannot purchase back; to which the metal of Potosi, and all you can buy with ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... gold into this horrid mess? One thing, however, was clear—he had lost, not only Suky, but prestige. The yellow girl would scorn him, and tell of his preposterous promises. Mandy had been offended beyond hope, and he would become the laughing- stock and byword of all the colored ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... the reference to my fences, and construed it as having a political significance. The phrase "mending fences" became a byword, and every politician engaged in strengthening his position is still said to ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the use of the modeling tool. When the need for work began to be felt, when the Prince de Wissembourg, president of the committee of subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas spoke the inevitable byword of the idler, "I am just going to work on it," and he lulled his dear Hortense with fallacious promises and the magnificent schemes of the artist as he smokes. Hortense loved her poet more than ever; she dreamed of a sublime statue of Marshal Montcornet. Montcornet would ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Henry Fenn's name was a byword; but the pitying angels who have seen him fight in the days of his strength and manhood—they looked at Henry Fenn, and touched reverent foreheads in his high honor. Then why did they who know our hearts so well, let the blow ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... to the perverters![FN31] Ye are no other than devils." However, the Khalif accosted him and said to him, "O my brother, did I not say to thee that I would return to thee?" Quoth Aboulhusn, "I have no need of thee; and as the byword says in verse: ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... credit the Serbians of the kingdom, and the triumphs of the valiant Serbian peasant soldiers immediately imparted a heroic glow to the country whose very name, at any rate in central Europe, had become a byword, and a synonym for failure; Belgrade became the cynosure and the rallying-centre of the whole Serbo-Croatian race. But Vienna and Budapest could only lose courage and presence of mind for the moment, and the undeniable success ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... abundant." The representations in the other prophets are to the same effect. Zephaniah passes on the whole class the sweeping judgment, that they are light and treacherous persons. But the lowest deep is reached in Zechariah, who foresees a time, close at hand, when the very name of prophet will be a byword, and the father and mother of anyone who pretends to prophesy will thrust him through, to deliver themselves from the reproach of ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... morrow or be sent into a lower class among little boys who would make a joke of him. He had gone out in tears, and when he came the next day, although his stupidity, born of a mind that would listen to every wandering sound and brood upon every wandering light, had so long been the byword of the school, he knew his lesson so well that he passed to the head of the class, and from that day was the best of scholars. At first Brother Dove thought this was an answer to his own prayers to the Virgin, and took it for a great ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... enjoyed a peculiarly poisonous variety of him. In his Renaissance guise, whether projected upon actual history, as in the person of Richard III, or strutting sublimated through Marlowe's blank verse, he spared at any rate to sentimentalise his brutality. Our forefathers summed him up in the byword that an Italianate Englishman was a devil incarnate; but he had the grace of being Italianate. It is from the Germanised avatar—the Bismarck of the 'Ems telegram,' with his sentimentalising historians and philosophers—that Europe would seem to be recovering to-day. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
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