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More "Crabbed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Teddy, a village boy, helped to raise the mortgage on his mother's home, and the means he took for doing so. The obstacles his crabbed uncle placed in his way; his connection with the fakirs at the County Fair; his successful Cane and Knife Board venture; his queer lot of friends and now they aided him; and how he ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... none beholden, save to me alone. For it is neither the spear of throughly-begotten Pallas, nor the buckler of cloud-gathering Jove, that multiplies and propagates mankind: but my sportive and tickling recreation that proceeded the old crabbed philosophers, and those who now supply their stead, the mortified monks and friars; as also kings, priests, and popes, nay, the whole tribe of poetic gods, who are at last grown so numerous, as in the camp of heaven (though ne'er so spacious), to jostle ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... everything, and how Man has spoiled it all! Fancy passion, the most subtle, evanescent, delicate, elusive emotion—and yet one so strong—fancy that being bound down by crabbed and crooked laws, being confined by ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... in 1554, John Lyly studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and received the degree of Master of Arts. Not a very diligent scholar, he disliked the "crabbed studies" of logic and philosophy, "his genie being naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry," but he was reputed at the University as afterward at Elizabeth's court, "a rare poet, witty, comical, and facetious." During his ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... coeval with the capital. We are told that while crabbed old Davy Burns, the owner of the most valuable part of the site of Washington City, was haggling with General Washington over his proportion of lots, his neglected and intemperate brother, Tommy, was an inmate ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... preconceived notion of him. She had imagined him a stiff, disagreeable, jealous old man, who wore a green velvet skull-cap and played tedious fugues. This prejudice, needless to say, was dispelled at their first meeting, when she found the crabbed creation of her fancy a man of the world, with gracious, winning manners, and a brilliant conversationalist not only on music, ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... even stronger genius, on the other hand, struck notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... of relief. The people had roared at the funny sight of the clown shaking hands with the crabbed old man; but to Phil Forrest there had been nothing of humor in it. The sight of his uncle brought ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... chief property owners in our neighbourhood is a rather crabbed old bachelor. Having no children and heavy taxes to pay, he looks with jaundiced eye on additions to schoolhouses. He will object and growl and growl and object, and yet pin him down as I have seen ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... thou, my friend, By well translating better dost commend; Those youthful hours which, of thy equals most 230 In toys have squander'd, or in vice have lost, Those hours hast thou to nobler use employ'd; And the severe delights of truth enjoy'd. Witness this weighty book, in which appears The crabbed toil of many thoughtful years, Spent by thy author, in the sifting care Of Rabbins' old sophisticated ware From gold divine; which he who well can sort May afterwards make algebra a sport: A treasure, which if country curates buy, 240 They Junius and Tremellius[89] may defy; Save pains in various ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... said Ella, who hardly knew whether to smile or frown at the sarcastic petulance of his guest, who went on with a sly smile—"And now old Dunstan does not know where I am. He left me with a huge pile of books in musty Latin, or crabbed English, and I had to read this and to write that, as if I were no prince, but a scrivener, and had to get my living by my pen; but as soon as he was gone I had a headache, and persuaded my venerable uncle the king, through the physician, that I ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on some remote and rocky hill-side, where it is as yet unobserved by man, may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,—at least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... persistently occupied with the grave and important things of the spirit, although when brought into sharp contact with busy and overworked people, he inevitably appeared self-absorbed and slothful. Certainly no one who had read her paper could again see such an old man in his praying shawl bent over his crabbed book, without a sense ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... his looks," said our Superior. This good man liked every one. His was the placid, easy Alsatian nature, prone to find goodness in all things—even crabbed Abonus. The Director, or, as he was known, Brother Elysee, was a stout, round little man, with a fine face and imperturbable good spirits. He was adored by all his subordinates. But I fancy he did not advance in favor ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... than the common pomological orchard types. There are the crabs. In general usage, the word "crab" designates an apple that is small, sour and crabbed. Such apples are wildings or seedlings. They are merely depreciated forms of Pyrus Malus, and probably much like the first apples known to man. What are known to horticulturists as crab-apples, however, are other ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... seated before his great carved desk, on which his head and shoulders had fallen forward; they rested on a sheet of legal-cap paper half-covered with a calculation in his crabbed old hand as to the value of certain properties—the calculation which he never finished; and underneath was a mass of miscellaneous papers, among them his will, dated the day after Billy left Selwoode, in which Frederick R. Woods ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... picture. An excellent likeness—half bulldog, half terrier. Judging from that ugly, crabbed old dog over the mantelpiece, what sort of a fellow ought ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... distant town a volume of parables and fables for her entertainment. It was beautiful to the sight, being richly bound in silk and gold embroidery; but on opening it she soon found that there was little pleasure to be got from it on account of the difficulty she found in reading the crabbed handwriting. After spending some minutes in trying to decipher a paragraph or two she threw the book ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... a very horrid thing!' cried the impetuous Bess. 'I would ever so much rather Ida married poor Brian, although they had to pig in furnished lodgings for the first ten years of their life. Crabbed age and ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Crabbed Age and Youth Cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasance, Age is full of care; Youth like summer morn, Age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave, Age like winter bare: Youth is full of sport, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... red-turreted wall of the Kremlin and the tall spear-pointed tower of the "Gate of Salvation." And now, being by this time somewhat fatigued by the exertion of a prolonged tramp in a heavy fur overcoat and felt-lined goloshes, he makes for a doorway above which appears, in crabbed Slavonian characters, the familiar word ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... that I've a sort of love, though it be a love without hope, for a very pretty girl, a woman also: now this being the case, I'm not fond of hearing women reflected on; for when they're young, they're the delight of our eyes; and when they're old, they're useful, though a trifle crabbed, but still useful; and a house without ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... quite correct there. Mr. Holden was naturally crabbed, and fair weather with him was the exception rather than the rule. On the present occasion it did not last ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... running a gentleman and his sister, fetched, and brought in by the maid, who had run down, and having let in a cursed crabbed old wretch, hobbling with his gout, and mumbling with his hoarse broken-toothed voice, who was metamorphosed all at once into a lively, gay young fellow, with a clear accent, and all his teeth, she would have it, that I was ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... carried it to a table. He undid the rough clasp that bound the book and began to turn the dingy pages. At length, he reached the one whereon the spell that he sought was written. The letters were crabbed and dim with age, and the Ash Goblin strained his eyes to see them, following the words with his crooked forefinger. He read the spell through carefully, again and again, until he was certain that he knew it by heart. Then he closed the book and returned it to its hiding-place. He made the ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... fortress you shall never again see the light of day. You threaten me—the Governor-General of Finland!" he laughed in a strange, high-pitched key as he threw himself into a chair and scribbled something rapidly upon paper, appending his signature in his small crabbed handwriting. ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... a land surveyor, and the town clerk, a close observer of men and their public and private affairs, and kept a careful record of current events in a "crabbed, eccentric but by no means entirely illegible hand" during the long years of his ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... qualities, the two are compatible with each other; whether, for instance, the bride be twenty and the bridegroom seventy years old, or the reverse; whether the bride be young, handsome and joyful, and the bridegroom old, ridden with disease and crabbed;—whatever the case, it concerns not the representative of the State or the Church; it is not for them to look into that. The marriage bond is "blessed,"—as a rule, blessed with all the greater solemnity in proportion to the size of the fee ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... saved his master's flock, but himself escaped with a whole skin. Everyone entertained a profound respect for him, and he might have been a popular pet but for his temper which, never genial, became more and more crabbed. He seemed to like Dorley, and Huldah, Dorley's eldest daughter, a shrewd, handsome, young woman, who, in the capacity of general manager of the house, was Wully's special guardian. The other members of Doricy's family Wully learned to tolerate, but the rest of the ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... lower windows were shut with shutters, so that all I could do was to cause Jumbo to awake the echoes with a lusty peal on the knocker, which he repeated at intervals, until there hobbled forth to open it a crone as wrinkled and crabbed as one of Macbeth's witches. I demanded whether my Lady Belamour lived there. She croaked forth a negative sound, and had nearly shut the door in my face, but I kept her in parley by protesting that I had often visited my Lady ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one is allowed to carry a cane up the Scala Santa, nor is dog allowed to set foot on these stairs. On the pavement stood a sentry-box; and in the box sat a little dark-visaged man, so very withered, so very old, and so very crabbed, that I almost was tempted to ask him whether he had been imported along with the stairs. He rattled his little tin-box violently, which seemed half full of small coins, and invited me to ascend. "What shall I have for doing so?" ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... window together and gone to join the Witch of Endor. But no, there he sat, and the sword before him, as if they never had stirred since I left. And the old man gave me a bit of parchment covered with crabbed Latin script, and told me I should find therein the sense of my two inscriptions, though there were words even he could not decipher. So I put the parchment in my pouch, and reached my hand to the sword, when ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... in the crabbed disguised penmanship it was part of my business to effect, I folded, sealed and addressed it, and summoning Vincenzo, bade him post it immediately. As soon as he had gone on this errand, I sat down to my as yet untasted breakfast and made some effort to eat ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... render this how comprehensible, and to prove the possibility of Mysteries. A certain writer named Thomas Bonartes Nordtanus Anglus, in his Concordia Scientiae cum Fide, claimed to do so. This work seemed to me ingenious and learned, but crabbed and involved, and it even contains indefensible opinions. I learned from the Apologia Cyriacorum of the Dominican Father Vincent Baron that that book was censured in Rome, that the author was a Jesuit, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... up Rachel to do the same thing, you know," the old lady went on, roused to fresh indignation at the thought of her great-niece, and she pulled her little cloth jacket down, and generally shook herself together. Crabbed age and jackets should not live together. Age should be wrapped in the ample and tolerant cloak, hider of frailties. It was not Aunt Anna's fault, however, if her garments were uncompromising and scanty of outline. Predestination ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... recovery from almost insanity to be retarded by having nothing to listen to except the wind moaning among old chimneys and older ash-trees—nothing to look at except heathery hills, walked over when life had all to hope for and nothing to regret with me—no one to speak to except crabbed old Greeks and Romans who have been dust the last five [sic] thousand years. And yet this quiet life, from its contrast, makes the year passed at Luddendenfoot appear like a nightmare, for I would rather give my hand than undergo again the grovelling carelessness, the malignant, yet cold debauchery, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... gray-headed Chimpanzee, one day found meditating in the woods. Rozoko was his name. He was very grave, and reverend of aspect; much of a philosopher. To him, all gnarled and knotty subjects were familiar; in his day he had cracked many a crabbed nut. And so in love with his Timonean solitude was Rozoko, that it needed many bribes and bland persuasions, to induce him to desert his mossy, hillside, misanthropic cave, for the distracting ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... patrons, and from whom he has received portions of land or annual grants of money, timing his arrival, if possible, to suit occasions of marriage or other domestic festivals. After he has received the usual courtesies he produces the Wai, a book written in his own crabbed hieroglyphics or in those of his father, which contains the descent of the house from its founder, interspersed with many a verse or ballad, the dark sayings contained in which are chanted forth in musical cadence to a delighted audience, and are then orally interpreted by the bard with many ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... all the Endearments I should show, At last she turn'd both Libertine and Shrow, From my Submission grew perverse and proud, Crabbed as Varges, and as Thunder loud; Did what she pleas'd, would no Obedience own, And redicul'd the Patience I had shown. Fear'd no sharp threatnings, valued no disgrace, But flung the wrongs she'd done me ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... sheet of paper on which were a few lines in a rather crabbed hand; which Fred would once have said was just like the character of the whimsical old maid herself, but which he now knew ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... plainly to your aunt," said Mr. Keller; "you will probably be recalled to London by return of post. In the meantime, on the next occasion when you spend the evening out, be so obliging as to leave word to that effect with one of the servants." The crabbed old housekeeper (known in the domestic circle as Mother Barbara) had her fling at me next. She set down the dish which she had kept hot for me, with a bang that tried the resisting capacity of the porcelain severely. "I've done it this once," she said. "Next time you're late, ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... round him of Olympian cheer, 180 Like visits of those earthly gods he came; His look, wherever its good-fortune fell, Doubled the feast without a miracle, And on the hearthstone danced a happier flame; Philemon's crabbed vintage grew benign; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... possible. We must realise that Raleigh was a man of severe speech and reserved manner, not easily moved to be gracious, constantly reproving the sluggish by his rapidity, and galling the dull by his wit. All through his career we find him hard to get on with, proud to his inferiors, still more crabbed to those above him. If policy required that he should use the arts of a diplomatist, he overplayed his part, and stung his rivals to the quick by an obsequiousness in speech to which his eyes and shoulders gave the lie. With all his wealth and influence, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... competition for the northern town hall had been won by a youth not twenty-three years of age. Mr. Enwright had been almost cross, asserting that the victory was perhaps a fluke, as the design of another competitor was in reality superior to George's. Mr. Enwright had also said, in his crabbed way: "You'll soon cut me out"; and, George protesting, had gone on: "Oh! Yes, you will. I've been through this sort of thing before. I know what I'm talking about. You're no different from the rest." ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... settled. She will obey this crabbed veteran's behest and enjoy a little more of the good the gods have provided for her before returning to ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... living He might speak of bachelor life. But such men need not be giving Crabbed views of ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... sepulchres, Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave, As loth to leave the body that it loved, And linked itself by carnal sensualty To a degenerate and degraded state. SEC. BRO. How charming is divine Philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns. Eld. Bro. List! list! I hear Some far-off hallo break the silent air. SEC. BRO. Methought so too; what should ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... thing in this affair is, that I cannot take the comfort of my poor friend Dabbler, by calling you a crabbed fellow, because you write with almost more kindness than ever neither can I (though I try hard) persuade myself that you have not a grain of taste in your whole composition. This, however, seriously I do believe, that when my two ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... a very bad line. But people do not say that this proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form; they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... himself we know little; he is one of the most obscure figures in our literature. During the days of Cromwell's Protectorate he was in the employ of Sir Samuel Luke, a crabbed and extreme type of Puritan nobleman, and here he collected his material and probably wrote the first part of his burlesque, which, of course, he did not dare to publish until ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... men, this cavalier is the friend of a friend of mine. Es mucho hombre. There is none like him in Spain. He speaks the crabbed Gitano, though he ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... there were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the course of the season. He also did a father's share of work with the children. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roof above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his wife came out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately around at the bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself, and then crawl ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... Lesbia!) and live we our day, While all stern sayings crabbed sages say, At one doit's value let us price and prize! The Suns can westward sink again to rise But we, extinguished once our tiny light, 5 Perforce shall slumber through one lasting night! Kiss me a thousand times, then hundred more, Then thousand others, then a new five-score, Still other ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... hired Mr. Foswick to do carpentry, and the rather crabbed and cross old man did not want to ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Christmas Tree Cove • Laura Lee Hope
... hard-hearted old man, even if you are my uncle! Oh, you don't know how often I've wanted to tell you so too,—always prying into this, asking questions about that, finding fault, forever cross and snappish and suspicious. A waspish, crabbed old wretch, that's what you are! I just hate ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... good liquor Will end a contest quicker Than justice, judge, or vicar; So fill a cheerful glass, And let good humour pass. But if more deep the quarrel, Why, sooner drain the barrel Than be the hateful fellow That's crabbed when he's ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... Lady, designed him for the law, having bred him first with that famous schoolmaster Mr. Farnaby, and then under the tuition of Dr. Beale, in Jesus College in Cambridge, from whence, being a most excellent Latinist, he was admitted into the Inner Temple; but it seemed so crabbed a study, and disagreeable to his inclinations, that he rather studied to obey his mother than to make any progress in the law. Upon the death of his mother, whom he dearly loved and honoured, he went into France to Paris, where he had three cousins german, Lord Strangford, Sir John Baker ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... the Lady Juana, which gives Columbus's own statement of the indignities put upon him in San Domingo, is written in his most crabbed Spanish. He never wrote the Spanish language accurately, and the letter, as printed from his own manuscript, is even curious in its infelicities. It is so striking an illustration of the character of the man that we print here an abstract ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... in this instance, is not an English word." Is it not surprising that the language of Mr. Petulengro and of Tawno Chikno, is continually coming to my assistance whenever I appear to be at a nonplus with respect to the derivation of crabbed words? I have made out crabbed words in AEschylus by means of the speech of Chikno and Petulengro, and even in my Biblical researches I have derived no slight assistance from it. It appears to be a kind of picklock, an open sesame, Tanner—Tawno! the one is ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... borne the heat and labour of the plough, When Evening came and her sweet cooling hour, Should seek to trespass on a neighbour copse, Where greener herbage waved, or clearer streams Invited him to slake his burning thirst? That Man were crabbed, who should say him Nay: That Man were churlish, who should drive ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... was saying, never gets too old—never gets too crabbed, for what my friend Amos's friend Emerson calls 'a ruddy drop of manly blood'—eh? So, when that 'ruddy drop of manly blood' comes a surging up in me, I says I'll just about have a party for that drop of manly blood! I'm going to tell you all about it. There's ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... many feared him, mainly, perhaps, because of his facility for intrigue, his power of bullying, and his great influence at Court. As we have seen, the conciliatory efforts of the monarch had hitherto averted a rupture between Pitt and Thurlow. But not even the favour of George III could render the crabbed old Chancellor endurable. His spitefulness had increased since Pitt's nomination of Pepper Arden to the Mastership of the Rolls; and he showed his spleen by obstructing Government measures in the House of Lords. In April ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... letter to me?" said Houseman, seizing the epistle in question. "Hem! the Knaresbro' postmark—my mother-in-law's crabbed hand, too! what ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Crabbed and crusty as ever!" said she. "I expected as much: it would not be you if you did not snub one. But now, come, grand-mother, I hope you like coffee as much, and pistolets as little as ever: are ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... in his hand, in which he collected eleemosynary sous. The old fellow had a favorite song, which he used to sing with great glee to a merry, joyous air, the burden of which ran "Chantons l'amour et le plaisir!" I often thought it would have been a good lesson for the crabbed and discontented rich man to have heard this remnant of humanity—poor, blind, and in rags, and dependent upon casual charity for his daily bread, singing in so cheerful a voice the charms of existence, and, as it were, fiddling life away to a ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the fat boy in Pickwick Papers. And I thanked God for the new energy which had sent me to this lovely city by the lake. I thanked Him that I had not been content to remain a burden to Max and Norah, growing sour and crabbed with the years. Those years of work and buffeting had made of me a broader, finer, truer type of womanhood—had caused me to forget my own little tragedy in contemplating the great human comedy. And so I made a little prayer there in the ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... a woman. Affection had to find some outlet. Not on the practical and very prosaic mother; not on the absorbed and crabbed father; but on Densuke, on the samurai's attendant or chu[u]gen, it fell. All manner of little services were rendered to him; even such as would appropriately fall within his own performance. At first O'Mino sought out little missions for him to perform, out of the line of his usual ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... cruel, sir, I must tell you. There are three of us ladies at the Castle, and we are all dying with curiosity to know who you are. [Exit STRANGER.] The master is crabbed enough, however. Let me try what I can make of the man. Pray, sir— [FRANCIS turns his back to her.] —The beginning promises little enough. Friend, why won't you look ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... how late Phebe sometimes calls us in the morning,' Jacinth used to say. 'There's nothing that would vex her more than laziness, and it is very tiresome. But then, very likely, she'd get us some prim maid that would be ill-natured and crabbed, and perhaps not really as ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... book. The cover dropped off at his touch; he turned back the first three pages, which were blank. On the fourth, written in the now-familiar crabbed hand, were the words: The Journal of James Hudson ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... of paper she held out to me. It bore these words, written in the crabbed and somewhat uncertain hand which ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... sourness &c adj.; acid, acidity, low pH; acetous fermentation, lactic fermentation. vinegar, verjuice^, crab, alum; acetic acid, lactic acid. V. be sour; sour, turn sour &c adj.; set the teeth on edge. render sour &c adj.; acidify, acidulate. Adj. sour; acid, acidulous, acidulated; tart, crabbed; acetous, acetose^; acerb, acetic; sour as vinegar, sourish, acescent^, subacid [Chem]; styptic, hard, rough. Phr. sour as ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... felicity in both French and English. His walk in life gives him a singularly catholic outlook. His learning is profound, but he is not overburdened by it, and he preserves his native gaiety of style even when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times discursive, but he is never tedious; and he shows no trace of that philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision which the detailed study of literary history ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... thrush,[9] and to have rewarded a worthless writer,[10] Clutorius Priscus, for a poem composed on the death of Germanicus. On the other hand, he seems to have had a sincere love of literature,[11] though he wrote in a crabbed and affected style. He was a purist in language with a taste for archaism,[12] left a brief autobiography[13] and dabbled in poetry, writing epigrams,[14] a lyric conquestio de morte Lucii Caesaris[15] and Greek imitations of Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... and recognises its claim on him." Here, again, it is easy to see how illuminating would be this conception of law for the Roman of Scipio's time. So far the Roman idea and study of law (as I have elsewhere expressed it)[792] had been of a crabbed, practical character, wanting in breadth of treatment, destitute of any philosophical conception of the moral principles which lie behind all law and government. The new doctrine called up life in these dry bones, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... as the long-pent sea-mist overflowed the cliff, wallowing and billowing like an oceanic invasion, over the face of the moor. Whitefoot brought back hidden in his collar the simple message, "I shall be there," signed with the well-known crabbed fist of "Adam Ferris," traditional in his family for some hundreds of years, which seemed completely identical with ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... lent her some scores of Carlyle letters that have never been published, and crabbed was the writing, but though my mother liked to have our letters read aloud to her, she read every one of these herself, and would quote from them in her talk. Side by side with the Carlyle letters, which show him in his most gracious light, were many ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... letter was about?" Mrs. Mallathorpe moved over to the hearth, and took an envelope from the rack. She handed it to Collingwood, indicating that he could open it. And Collingwood drew out one of old Bartle's memorandum forms, and saw a couple of lines in the familiar crabbed handwriting: ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... ever thirsting for the lover's blood and whose malignant tongues aim only at the "defilement of separation." Youth is upright as an Alif, or slender and bending as a branch of the Ban-tree which we should call a willow-wand,[FN307] while Age, crabbed and crooked, bends groundwards vainly seeking in the dust his lost juvenility. As Baron de Slane says of these stock comparisons (Ibn Khall. i. xxxvi.), "The figurative language of Moslem poets is often difficult to be understood. The narcissus ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... never finds out exactly, but which one guesses pretty nearly." "What is it?" "I do not know anything about it. Mascaret leads a very fast life now, after having been a model husband. As long as he remained a good spouse, he had a shocking temper and was crabbed and easily took offense, but since he has been leading his present, rackety life, he has become quite indifferent; but one would guess that he has some trouble, a worm gnawing somewhere, for he has aged ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... This way of stretching a village all along one street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization. When I was at college I was compelled to read a work by the crabbed Tacitus on the Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is vague and fantastic nonsense and much that is wilful lying, comes this excellent truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men together. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs nestling, as the phrase goes, in ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... a little snack," admitted the crabbed old man. "I did think of stopping in the restaurant at the railroad depot on my way here, and getting a sandwich. But the girl said sandwiches were ten cents, and they didn't look worth ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... still looking on Nashta, ''Tis a command that the voice of none that are crabbed and hideous be heard in the harem, and I find comfort in it, O Nashta! but speak thou, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... branches. The oldest and most stately trunks open to make way for the soul which each of them contains. The appearance of these souls differs according to the appearance and the character of the trees which they represent. The soul of the ELM, for instance, is a sort of pursy, pot-bellied, crabbed gnome; the LIME-TREE is placid, familiar and jovial; the BEECH, elegant and agile; the BIRCH, white, reserved and restless; the WILLOW, stunted, dishevelled and plaintive; the FIR-TREE, tall, lean and taciturn; the CYPRESS, tragic; the CHESTNUT-TREE, ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Riggan coal-pits. Crabbed, wrinkled, sarcastic old fellow, whose self-conceit is immeasurable. "The biggest trouble I ha' is settlin' i' my moind what the world'll do when I turn up my toes to th' daisies, an' how the government'll mak' up their moinds who shall ha' th' honer o' payin' ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... world ought to have money it is that good looking brother of ours," remarked Jess with a sigh. "He'd appreciate it so thoroughly. I don't wonder he's crabbed this afternoon. Just think of the chance for a good time he's had to let slip just for lack of ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... by the rapidity with which the discredited past was re-created by Bowman's mere presence. He was at the point of refusing to fetch the beer when he saw that there was no explanation possible; they would regard him as merely crabbed, and Bella would indulge her habit of shrill abuse. It wasn't the drink itself that disturbed him but the old position of "rushing the can"—a symbol of so much that he had left forever. Forever; he repeated the word with a silent bitter force. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... everything else in this world. You have got to keep the devil out of everything, yourself included. He will get in if he can, as he got into the Garden of Eden. The play piers have taken a hold of the people which no crabbed old bachelor can loosen with trumped-up charges. Their civilizing influence upon the children is already felt in a reported demand for more soap in the neighborhood where they are, and even ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... place of simpler and sweeter happiness than this, because they do not take their forgiveness as a right, but as a gracious and unexpected boon. And indeed the sights and sounds of this place are the best medicine for crabbed, worldly, conventional souls, who are often brought here when they are drawing near ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... noticed it plainly and turned her face away. Captain's wife! That girl covered with rugs in a long chair. Captain's . . . ! He gasped mentally. It had never occurred to him that a captain's wife could be anything but a woman to be described as stout or thin, as jolly or crabbed, but always mature, and even, in comparison with his own years, frankly old. But this! It was a sort of moral upset as though he had discovered a case of abduction or something as surprising as that. You understand that nothing is more disturbing than the upsetting of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... a Parisian journalist. He used his influence in starting Marie Godeschal, usually called Mariette, at the Porte Saint-Martin. The husband of an ugly, vulgar, and crabbed woman, he had by her children that were by no means welcome. He lived in wretched lodgings on the rue Mandar, when Lucien de Rubempre was presented to him. Vernou was a caustic critic on the side of the oppositon. The uncongeniality of his domestic ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... of claret wine in the parlour; the General came out when his Grace's cantering horse had ceased its merry hollow sound upon the dry road to Dhu Loch, and breathed fully like one relieved from an oppression. Later Old Islay had come up, crabbed and snuffy, to glower on Nan as he passed into the house behind her father, and come out anon smiling and even joco with her, mentioning her by her Christian name like the closest friend of the family. Then for reasons inscrutable her father would have her constant in his sight, ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... so thou art of that sort!" rejoined his uncle. "I know them! A crabbed black and white page is meat and drink to them! There's that Dutch fellow, with a long Latin name, thin and weazen as never was Dutchman before; they say he has read all the books in the world, and can talk in all the tongues, and yet when ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... something more than a ton per day. Each bushel of fruit will produce from four to five pounds of jelly, fruit ripening late in the season being more productive than earlier varieties. Crab apples produce the finest jelly; sour, crabbed, natural fruit makes the best looking article, and a mixture of all varieties gives most satisfactory results as ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... were smiling too, and Dolly looked such a picture of innocent delight that a pang shot through the observer's tender heart. For she knew that those "Important" letters concerned the child. They were addressed in Ephraim Cook's familiar, crabbed hand, and the man would never have ventured to disturb the peace of his absent employer except by that employer's command. Also, she knew that the only business of "Importance" the Judge had entrusted to Mr. Cook was that concerning Dorothy C. All law matters were attended to by ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... round dot or long stroke would represent nothing, and the clear delineation too much. They were not mere dots of color which I saw on the hill, but something full of essence of pine; out of which I could gather which were young and which were old, and discern the distorted and crabbed pines from the symmetrical and healthy pines; and feel how the evening sun was sending its searching threads among their dark leaves;—assuredly they were more than dots of color. And yet not one of their boughs ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... genuine thing would be what I want; but there would be more likelihood of its being so, and less annoyance in laying it aside us worthless, as I do this, selecting, for a second trial, a piece of what I call crabbed wood, known by a peculiar curl, and its very handsome ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... more peaceably with one another. It downright grieves me to have 'em so spited here in they old age." And Mother Mayberry's eyes took on a regretful look and she peered over her glasses at the happy bride. On her buoyant heart she ever carried the welfare of every soul in Providence and the crabbed old couple down the Road was a constant source ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... his own, but who had distinguished himself, as a man, by high civic courage, and as a senator by his determined speeches in behalf of the Union. This was Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a man honest, patriotic, but narrow and crabbed, who turned out to be the most unfortunate choice ever made, with the possible exception of ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... a permanent characteristic of religion, and that gladness is a more acceptable offering than tears, they teach a valuable lesson, needed always by men who fancy that they must atone for their sins by their own sadness, and that religion is gloomy, harsh, and crabbed. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... undergone, and most poor matters Point to rich ends. This my mean task Would be as heavy to me as odious, but 5 The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, And makes my labours pleasures: O, she is Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed. And he's composed of harshness. I must remove Some thousands of these logs, and pile them up, 10 Upon a sore injunction: my sweet mistress Weeps when she sees me work, and says, such baseness Had never like executor. I forget: ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... manner did Melchitsedek Pinchas approach Hiram Lyons and Simon Gradkoski, the former a poverty-stricken pietist who added day by day to a furlong of crabbed manuscript, embodying a useless commentary on the first chapter of Genesis; the latter the portly fancy-goods dealer in whose warehouse Daniel Hyams was employed. Gradkoski rivalled Reb Shemuel in his knowledge of the exact loci of Talmudical remarks—page this, and line that—and ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... neighbors 'Granny Holt.' Coming from a street of the town at some distance, we had heard nothing that I remember about her; but the day had not gone by, before it was made fully known to us by such acquaintances as we saw, that we had taken up our abode in the same house with a person of a very crabbed disposition, whom all the neighborhood looked upon as a witch. This was not very agreeable news, but we tried to make the best of it. Our house was near the river-side, and we were surrounded by the families of those who followed the sea, and we endeavored to flatter ourselves with the ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... understand that she was a woman of her word, and that an undrained cabbage would be the signal for the execution of her threat. From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... and Mr. Assistant Secretary Campbell is crabbed—Congress not having passed his Supreme Court bill. And if it were passed, the President would hardly ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... him the note from Grylls. It was scribbled in a small, crabbed hand on the back of a business letter. On the other side Garth had a glimpse of the time-honoured formula: "Dear Sir: Yours of the first instant to hand, and contents noted. In reply we beg to say——" It gave him a queer, incongruous start: outside, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... experienced sisters already familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men. They had had more long voyages to make their names in than she had known weeks of carefully tended life, for a new ship receives as much attention as if she were a young bride. Even crabbed old dock-masters look at her with benevolent eyes. In her shyness at the threshold of a laborious and uncertain life, where so much is expected of a ship, she could not have been better heartened and comforted, had she only been able to hear and understand, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... Ballad shall, indeed, have an honoured place in my poor Collection whenever the public taste calls for a new edition. But the original, what would I not give to have it in my hands, to touch the very parchment which came from the press of my revered ancestor, and, gloating on the crabbed letters, confute MacCribb to his face ipso visu et tactu of so inestimable a rarity. Exchanges—or "swaps," as the vulgar call them—are not unknown among our fraternity. Ask what you will for this treasure, to the half of my kingdom: my ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... and go away. As she kissed her friend's tiny befrilled face, she felt for the first time really fond of her, and grateful also. She had made the discovery lately that you could not judge people by their outsides, or even by what others said of them. Under her cross, crabbed manner Sophia Jane had hidden a grateful heart, which had answered to the first touch of kindness; and disguised by sharp and shrewish words, she had shown a really generous and forgiving spirit. Like Madame Jones, it appeared that she ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... ambitious tragedy, as in the two parts of "Antonio and Mellida," we see the poet at his best—and also at his worst. A vehement and resolute desire to give weight to every line and emphasis to every phrase has too often misled him into such brakes and jungles of crabbed and convulsive bombast, of stiff and tortuous exuberance, that the reader in struggling through some of the scenes and speeches feels as though he were compelled to push his way through a cactus hedge: the hot and heavy blossoms of rhetoric ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... crabbed old thing, so the inference is fair that she is miserable. In fact, I do not see ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... starting-point or a measurement taken; it seems to have grown as a beautiful tendril grows, and every curve sways as mysteriously, and the perfection seems as divine. Beside it Duerer would seem crabbed and puzzle-headed; Holbein would seem angular and geometrical; Da Vinci would seem vague: and I hope that no critic by partial quotation will endeavour to prove me guilty of having said that Ingres was a greater artist than Da Vinci. I have ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... sons, one of whom kept a small flat-boat for fishing and gunning purposes. I saw the owner of the boat hoeing in the garden. Though I was hardly acquainted with him, I went to him and asked if he would lend me his boat for half an hour. I found he was a crabbed fellow, and was not disposed to oblige me. I told him that I was in a great hurry, that my own skiff was broken, and if he would lend me his I would give him a dollar for the use of her. The dollar opened his eyes and his heart, if he had any. He consented to the bargain, and I paid him ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... when, lowering her pretty head to scrutinize my crabbed handwriting, she cried, "It is certainly he, the americain-flamand! I was certain ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... of the Wesleyan Methodists. It evidently includes the great body of the piety, Christian enterprise, and sterling virtue of the nation. It is, in time of party excitement, alike hated and denounced by the ultra Tory, the crabbed Whig, and the Radical leveller. Such was our impression of the true character of what, by the periodical press in England, is termed a moderate Tory. From his theories we in some respects dissent; but his integrity, his honesty, his consistency, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... to rise up from the grave to-morrow, he wouldn't trust the old blade with a penny piece, but would tell him that his son Josh was too old a soldier to be done again, Sir. That he was a suspicious, crabbed, cranky, used-up, J. B. infidel, Sir; and that if it were consistent with the dignity of a rough and tough old Major, of the old school, who had had the honour of being personally known to, and commended by, their late Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Kent and York, to retire to a tub and live ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... How crabbed and how scowling in the eyes Is man's old age!—Would that my son likewise Were happy of his hunting, in my way When with his warrior bands he will essay The wild beast!—Nay, his valiance is to fight With God's will! ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... dirty volume, from the Minerva press, or a half-bound, half-guinea's worth of fashionable trash, but a good, honest, heavy-looking, wisdom-implying book, horribly stuffed with epithet of drug; a book in which Latin words were redundant, and here and there were to be observed the crabbed characters of Greek. Altogether, with my book and my look, I cut such a truly medical appearance, that even the most guarded would not have hesitated to allow me the sole conduct of a whitlow, from inflammation to suppuration, and from suppuration to cure, or have ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... answer for it, especially now that M. Olivier Vinet has left Mantes; for between ourselves, good M. Leboeuf was afraid of that crabbed little official. If you will permit me, Madame La Presidente, I will go to Mantes and see M. Leboeuf. No time will be lost, for I cannot be certain of the precise value of the property for two or three days. I do not wish that you should know all the ins and outs of this ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... loved your mother; but she—didn't love me. And after a time she went away with—your father. I did not know until then how much I did—care. The whole world suddenly seemed to turn black under my fingers, and—But, never mind. For long years I have been a cross, crabbed, unlovable, unloved old man—though I'm not nearly sixty, yet, Pollyanna. Then, One day, like one of the prisms that you love so well, little girl, you danced into my life, and flecked my dreary old world with dashes of the purple and gold and scarlet of your ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... acid, acidity, low pH; acetous fermentation, lactic fermentation. vinegar, verjuice[obs3], crab, alum; acetic acid, lactic acid. V. be sour; sour, turn sour &c. adj.; set the teeth on edge. render sour &c. adj.; acidify, acidulate. Adj. sour; acid, acidulous, acidulated; tart, crabbed; acetous, acetose[obs3]; acerb, acetic; sour as vinegar, sourish, acescent[obs3], subacid[Chem]; styptic, hard, rough. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the thought of what Count Bunau might be thinking of him seems to have been his greatest difficulty. On the other hand, he may have had a sense of a certain antique and as it were pagan grandeur in the Roman Catholic religion. Turning from the crabbed Protestantism, which had been the ennui of his youth, he might reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme tradition of ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... with prophetic wisdom. Dry Bottom was trying as best it knew how to wallow in the depths of sin. Unlovely, soiled, desolate of verdure, dumped down upon a flat of sand in a treeless waste, amid cactus, crabbed yucca, scorpions, horned toads, and rattlesnakes. Dry Bottom had forgotten its morals, subverted its principles, ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... comb it, Jenny, Now, if you like, and comb it all day long; But don't get crabbed, and ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the character of such a lovely girl was too exalted to inspire any other feeling than that of quiet reverence. But as lovers will not always be insulted, at all times and under all circumstances, by the frowns and cold looks of crabbed old age, which should continually reflect dignity upon those around, and treat the unfortunate as well as the fortunate with a graceful mien, he continued to use diligence and perseverance. All this lighted a spark in his heart that changed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so saying he ran off to find Amaranthe, whom he met coming as hastily from her apartment with the hyacinth in her hand. Look, look, shouted Adrian, here is my darling rose;—and see, answered his sister, I have got my sweet hyacinth, but with it I found this paper, containing some mighty crabbed, dismal words, that I could very well have dispensed with. "Aye, my gift was accompanied with a sort of a lecture too. It is very strange that so powerful a fairy should not be able to discern my good intentions, without my making ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... Potteries. There was also much handling of domestic provisions—streaky bacon, cheese, and so forth—but all this was proper enough in a play that largely turned upon the changes in an old celibate's menage. But in the main it was a comedy of character, a struggle between youth and crabbed age, in which the younger will and the quicker wit prevailed. As we first see him, James Ollerenshaw is a crusty, browbeating, misogynist, hoarding his wealth, content with a mean habit of life, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... pleasant visitor," laughed Red Reera. "People accuse me of being cross and crabbed and unsociable, and they are quite right. If you had come here pleading and begging for favors, and half afraid of my Yookoohoo magic, I'd have abused you until you ran away; but you're quite different from ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... this lanky flower-stalk, bending a little in a crabbed, broken way, like an obstinate person tired, pushes itself up out of a still more stubborn, nondescript, hollow angular, dogseared gas-pipe of a stalk, with a section something ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... divinest music seems to do. Their influence is always benign and serene, and we may always have recourse to it, while the secrets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann lie hidden between leaves, in the keeping of crabbed little hieroglyphs, and a voice, an instrument, or perhaps an orchestra, is needed to reveal them. The picture, the statue, has no secrets but open secrets. You stand before it, and the very soul and essence of it comes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... brushing against him. Perhaps he has lost money in a business deal; perhaps he wanted a political position and didn't get it; perhaps a supposed friend has proven untrue; perhaps his disappointment, whatever it is, has made him sour and crabbed. But he passes on, and we meet other faces. Here comes a man who looks something like this: [Draw the happy face, completing Fig. 8.] He doesn't look as if he had a care in all the world, does he? And yet we may find that he, too, has lost money in a ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America until it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first great ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... often domesticated in America. It is harmless as a dog or cat except when crossed by children, when it will snarl, snap, and bite like the most crabbed cur. It is troublesome, however, where poultry is kept, and this prevents its being much of a favourite. Indeed, it is not one, for it is hunted everywhere, and killed—wherever this can be ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... he writes, in his crabbed hand and nervous diction, "why men using the sea, and being otherwise fit objects to be impressed into His Majesty's service, should be exempted only because they are Freeholders. Nor did I ever read ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... stages) wherein a man can believe and discern for himself, without need of help from any other, and even in opposition to all others: but I consider him entirely unlikely to accomplish anything considerable, except some kind of crabbed, semi-perverse, though still manful existence of his own; which indeed is no despicable thing. His "more than prophetic egoism,"—alas, yes! It is of such material that Thebaid Eremites, Sect-founders, and all ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... London, I am going. My sister wants me there, and I do just as lief be in a tomb as stay at Oakhurst when Lady Clara is away. So, as she is willing, I shall just leave her at the junction, and go up to London. That I can do in spite of the crabbed old thing at Houghton, who wants her at first all ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... poetic materials as unrestricted and original, as if he had been born in days which claim as their own such freedom and such keen discriminative sense of what is real in feeling and image—as if he had never felt the attractions of a crabbed problem of scholastic logic, or bowed before the mellow grace of the Latins. It may be said, indeed, that the time was not yet come when the classics could be really understood and appreciated; and this is true, perhaps fortunate. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the enthusiasms of Coleridge which nobody was able to bear. Lamb would parade his admiration for some favourite author, Donne, for example, whom the rest of the company probably abhorred. He would select the most crabbed passages to quote and defend; he would stammer out his piquant and masterful half sentences, his scalding jests, his controvertible assertions; he would skilfully hint at the defects which no one else was permitted ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... old and the edges have worn so thin in the two hundred and fifty years since they were written, that each page has had to be most carefully framed in strong paper to keep it from getting torn. The ink is faded and brown, and the writing is often crabbed and difficult to read. But it can be read, and it is full of stories. In olden times, probably, the book was bound in a brown leather cover, but now, because it is very old and valuable, it has been clothed with beautiful red leather, on which ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... desire to keep that esteem is certainly a powerful agent in social welfare. It was reported that in many communities the advent of the Grange created a marked improvement in the dress and manners of the members. Crabbed men came out of their shells and grew genial; disheartened women became cheerful; repressed children delighted in the chance to play with other boys and girls ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... George growled and groaned a good deal, but perhaps Father Romuald pressed the duty on him in confession, for in his great relief at his lady's going off unplighted from London, he consented to indite, in the chamber Father Romuald shared with two of the Cardinal's chaplains, in a crooked and crabbed calligraphy and language much more resembling Anglo-Saxon than modern English, a letter to the most high and mighty, the Yerl ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of it was Peel bay, a wide stretch of beach, with a gentle slope to the left, dotted over with grey houses; the little town farther on, with its nooks and corners, its blind alleys and dark lanes, its narrow, crabbed, crooked streets. Behind this the old pier and the herring boats rocking in the harbour, with their brown sails half set, waiting for the top of the tide. In the distance the broad breast of Contrary Head, ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... him. Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead, Accents uncertain: "Time to taste life," another would have said, "Up with the curtain!" This man said rather, "Actual life comes next? Patience a moment! Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text, Still there's the comment. 60 Let me know all! Prate not of most or least, Painful or easy! Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast, Ay, nor feel queasy." Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, When he had learned it, When he had gathered all books had ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... ask Ben Weatherstaff," advised Martha. "He's not half as bad as he looks, for all he's so crabbed. Mr. Craven lets him do what he likes because he was here when Mrs. Craven was alive, an' he used to make her laugh. She liked him. Perhaps he'd find you a corner somewhere ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... effectually quenching all tragic and suicidal ideas by his prosaic statement of the facts. "Young man," he continued, tottering to his feet, "I s'pose you realize that you are in a pretty bad fix. I ain't much of a mother at comfortin'. When I feel most sorry for any one I'm most crabbed. It's one of my mean ways. If there's many screws loose in you, you will go under. If you are rash, or cowardly, or weak—that is, ready to give up-like—you will make a final mess of your life; but if you fight your way up you'll be a good deal ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... among the leading powers of the world, instructions to great commissions, plans for European campaigns, vast combinations covering the world, alliances of empire, scientific expeditions and discoveries—papers such as these covered now with the satirical dust of centuries, written in the small, crabbed, exasperating characters which make Barneveld's handwriting almost cryptographic, were once, when fairly engrossed and sealed with the great seal of the haughty burgher-aristocracy, the documents which occupied the close attention of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... or four hours he munched a manchet, and refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant; and when "he was put into this road of writing," as crabbed Anthony telleth, he fixed on "a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light;" and then hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous pages. Prynne has written a library amounting, I think, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... more use, each in his own domain, than, in that of Pomona, the old women who tie cherries upon sticks, for the more convenient portableness of the same. To cultivate well, and choose well, your cherries, is of some importance; but if they can be had in their own wild way of clustering about their crabbed stalk, it is a better connection for them than any other; and, if they cannot, then, so that they be not bruised, it makes to a boy of a practical disposition not much difference whether he gets them by ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... be readily conceived that this Man was never cut out to be a Presbyter, or any Thing that is severe and crabbed. In no Time did he lean to Faction, but did his Business without Offence to any. He put off officious Talk of Government or Politicks, with Jests, and so made his Wit a Catholicon, or Shield, to cover all ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... more frequent, however, he began to perceive, what other men were not slow to tell him, that Mr Silver thought him a bore. And the moment this flashed upon him, with his unfortunate antipathy to any thing like humbug, he began another war of independence. He selected crabbed passages; got them up carefully by the help of translations, scholiasts, and clever friends; and then took them up hot to Mr Silver. And when he detected him slurring a difficulty instead of explaining it, or saying there ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... akimbo, was going about the yard superintending. Her face brightened with her old smile. Her whole being revived and freshened, as though she had awakened from a long sleep. The veterinarian's wife and child arrived. She was a thin, plain woman, with a crabbed expression. The boy Sasha, small for his ten years of age, was a chubby child, with clear blue eyes and dimples in his cheeks. He made for the kitten the instant he entered the yard, and the place rang with his ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... on his neck," declared Fraser, swelling with conscious importance, "and I guess he's 'crabbed' us ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... kind of woman she was. Germanicus was given a huge funeral at Rome; he was the darling of the mob, and the funeral was really a demonstration against Tiberius. then Piso was to be tried for the murder: a crabbed but honest old plebeian of good and ancient family, who Tiberius knew well enough was innocent. There were threats of mob violence if he should be acquitted; and the suggestion studiously sown that Piso, guilty, had been ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... spent days and nights upon them, growing pale over their mystic lore, which seemed the fruit not merely of the Professor's own labors, but of those of more ancient sages than he; and often a whole volume seemed to be compressed within the limits of a few lines of crabbed manuscript, judging from the time which it cost even the quick-minded student to ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... but he is not to be trusted who loves voluntary falsehood, and he who loves involuntary falsehood is a fool. Neither condition is enviable, for the untrustworthy and ignorant has no friend, and as time advances he becomes known, and lays up in store for himself isolation in crabbed age when life is on the wane: so that, whether his children or friends are alive or not, he is equally solitary.—Worthy of honour is he who does no injustice, and of more than twofold honour, if he not only does no injustice himself, but hinders others from doing any; the first may count as one ...
— Laws • Plato
... this is very corrupt in the Greek. I have tried to get the best sense I could; but it is very obscure. Certainly Plutarch's style is often very harsh and crabbed. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... eleemosynary sous. The old fellow had a favorite song, which he used to sing with great glee to a merry, joyous air, the burden of which ran "Chantons l'amour et le plaisir!" I often thought it would have been a good lesson for the crabbed and discontented rich man to have heard this remnant of humanity—poor, blind, and in rags, and dependent upon casual charity for his daily bread, singing in so cheerful a voice the charms of existence, and, as it were, fiddling life away ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... light coat she wore she brought forth a handful of crumbs and scattered them for the saucy robins and then, unwilling to hasten, sat down upon the steps to watch their cheerful wrangling. Peeling for more crumbs she drew out a letter—a single sheet covered with the crabbed handwriting of Professor Willits. At sight of it a soft flush stole over her face. She forgot the crumbs and the robins for, although her letter was two days old and she knew exactly what it contained, the very sight of the written words was joy to her. Like all Willits' ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... (in Gesammelte Nachrichten), i. 848. Lloyd, UT SUPRA, i. 2-11 (who has solid information at first hand, having been an actor in these Wars. A man of great natural sagacity and insight; decidedly luminous and original, though of somewhat crabbed temper now and then; a man well worth hearing on this and on whatever else he handles). Tempelhof, GESCHICHTE DES SIEBENJAHRIGEN KRIEGES (which is at first a mere Translation of Lloyd, nothing new in it but certain notes and criticisms on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... represent nature through the images which words evoke in the mind, and these images may have significance for feeling. Their very evocation in musical language is bound to lend them some warmth of mood. Yet—as Lessing showed in his Laocoon, despite all the crabbed narrowness of his treatment—it is hopeless for the poet to enter into rivalry with the painter or sculptor. The colors and forms of things which the poet paints for the eye of the mind are mere shadows in comparison with those which we really see.[Footnote: The best the poet-painter ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... man, and therefore, according to the faith of his father, an outcast from the commonwealth. But he was a man of the world of affairs, keen for the welfare of his class at the University College—a man crabbed and gnarled on the surface, but within him a strong vein of tenderness of the sort that always seems ashamed of catching its possessor ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... Peel bay, a wide stretch of beach, with a gentle slope to the left, dotted over with grey houses; the little town farther on, with its nooks and corners, its blind alleys and dark lanes, its narrow, crabbed, crooked streets. Behind this the old pier and the herring boats rocking in the harbour, with their brown sails half set, waiting for the top of the tide. In the distance the broad breast of Contrary Head, and, a musket-shot outside of it, the little rocky islet whereon stand the stately ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... forgotten this discomfiture, as he chose to feel it, in the remembrance of an increase of income, and in the popularity he enjoyed in his new abode. All Hollingford came forward to do the earl's new agent honour. Mr. Sheepshanks had been a crabbed, crusty old bachelor, frequenting inn- parlours on market-days, not unwilling to give dinners to three or four chosen friends and familiars, with whom, in return, he dined from time to time, and with whom, also, he kept ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... was angular and iron-grey, with a summary tongue and wintry temper, chastened by a fondness for feline favourites. Unluckily, I was always falling foul of the latter, and my aunt continually fell foul of me in consequence. Crabbed age and youth could not live together in our case on account of cats. Age, as represented by the mature virgin, adored the brutes; youth, in the shape of a sprouting hobbledehoy, abhorred them altogether, and one evil minded black Tom ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... of her word, and that an undrained cabbage would be the signal for the execution of her threat. From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted Zora as ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... very bad, Missus. Here!" And the old coachman, almost as old as his master, gave to Mrs. Harper a note, which was only the second she had ever received from her husband's father. It was a crabbed, ancient hand, blotted and blurred, then steadied resolutely into the preciseness of a school-boy—one of those pathetic fragments of writing that irresistibly remind one of the trembling failing hand—the hand that once wrote ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... thought he had turned to face us. But though we were hardly a yard off he did not realize that we were there. He tapped four times on a very low and dirty door in the dark, crabbed street. A gleam of gas cut the darkness as it opened slowly. We listened intently, but the interview was short and simple and inexplicable as an interview could be. Our exquisite friend handed in what looked like a paper or ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... her knitting needles: "How do I know!" she said, "He lives alone so much, and he is crusty and crabbed, they say. I nursed him when he was a child, just as I nurse you now. He has a temper—Jesus-Maria—the master! But his heart is of gold. His wife—" she hesitated, "She was a singer, and she ran away and left him. They say she ran away with the famous tenor, Brondi, who used to sing Tristan. ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... the indifference that Sheridan did, who put them into livery to wait upon his guests. The debtor starts and grows pale at every knock at his door. His friends grow cool, and his relatives shun him. He is ashamed to go abroad, and has no comfort at home. He becomes crabbed, morose, and querulous, losing all pleasure in life. He wants the passport to enjoyment and respect—money; he has only his debts, and these make him suspected, despised, and snubbed. He lives in the ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... having nothing to listen to except the wind moaning among old chimneys and older ash-trees—nothing to look at except heathery hills, walked over when life had all to hope for and nothing to regret with me—no one to speak to except crabbed old Greeks and Romans who have been dust the last five [sic] thousand years. And yet this quiet life, from its contrast, makes the year passed at Luddendenfoot appear like a nightmare, for I would rather give my hand than undergo again the grovelling carelessness, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... the plough, When Evening came and her sweet cooling hour, Should seek to trespass on a neighbour copse, Where greener herbage waved, or clearer streams Invited him to slake his burning thirst? That Man were crabbed, who should say him Nay: That Man were churlish, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... life itself? and yet for this are none beholden, save to me alone. For it is neither the spear of throughly-begotten Pallas, nor the buckler of cloud-gathering Jove, that multiplies and propagates mankind: but my sportive and tickling recreation that proceeded the old crabbed philosophers, and those who now supply their stead, the mortified monks and friars; as also kings, priests, and popes, nay, the whole tribe of poetic gods, who are at last grown so numerous, as in the camp of heaven (though ne'er so spacious), to jostle for elbow room. But it ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... and he had it. Not "it" indeed, but them; for there were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the course of the season. He also did a father's share of work with the children. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roof above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his wife came out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately around at the bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself, and then crawl dutifully ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... lactic fermentation. vinegar, verjuice[obs3], crab, alum; acetic acid, lactic acid. V. be sour; sour, turn sour &c. adj.; set the teeth on edge. render sour &c. adj.; acidify, acidulate. Adj. sour; acid, acidulous, acidulated; tart, crabbed; acetous, acetose[obs3]; acerb, acetic; sour as vinegar, sourish, acescent[obs3], subacid[Chem]; styptic, hard, rough. Phr. sour as ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... 'tis a Crime for you to call for any Thing. When it is grown pretty late, and they don't expect any more Guests, out comes an old grey-bearded Servant, with his Hair cut short, and a crabbed Look, ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... heart. Much of man's self-respect arises from the esteem of others, and the desire to keep that esteem is certainly a powerful agent in social welfare. It was reported that in many communities the advent of the Grange created a marked improvement in the dress and manners of the members. Crabbed men came out of their shells and grew genial; disheartened women became cheerful; repressed children delighted in the chance to play with other boys and girls of ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... give up his mind to the last only. Are there not the six thousand verses composed for the use of kings, and containing the whole science? Learn these by heart, and you will be prepared for all emergencies." So then he must set to work to learn all these crabbed rules. He must; according to them, distrust every one, even wife or son. He must rise early, take a very scanty meal, and immediately ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... deserved their punishment, he was not sure that it was the best way to put down the heresy. If she was ruler, she continued, in her merry way, she would send all the schemers and ranters, and all the sour, crabbed, busybodies in the churches, off to Rhode Island, where all kinds of folly, in spirituals as well as temporals, were permitted, and one crazy head ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... MARQUIS DE, "crabbed old friend of men," born at Pertuis, in Provence, claimed to be of Florentine descent; "could never make the world go to his mind," and set about reforming it by coercing a family as self-willed as himself, to the driving of his celebrated son to desperate courses and reckless excesses; advocated ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... himself. What I value in the book is its absolute sincerity. He does not attempt to draw an ideal picture of his own life and character at the expense of other people. One sees him develop from the shy, gauche, immature boy into the mature, secluded, crabbed, ungracious student. If he had adopted a pose he might have sketched his own life in beautiful subdued colours; he might have made himself out as misrepresented and misunderstood. He does none of these things. He shows clearly ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... what that letter was about?" Mrs. Mallathorpe moved over to the hearth, and took an envelope from the rack. She handed it to Collingwood, indicating that he could open it. And Collingwood drew out one of old Bartle's memorandum forms, and saw a couple of lines in the familiar crabbed handwriting: ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... know anything about it. Mascaret leads a very fast life now, after being a model husband. As long as he remained a good spouse he had a shocking temper, was crabbed and easily took offence, but since he has been leading his present wild life he has become quite different, But one might surmise that he has some trouble, a worm gnawing somewhere, for he has aged ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... reprehensible Slav it was that lived in those parts.... The last Patriarch of Ochrida, whose name was likewise Arsenius, spent the remainder of his life in exile at Mt. Athos, and there, in another monastery, was a pale, sickly monk, poring over crabbed MSS. This Paissu, a Bulgar, had entered, like his elder brother, the great Serbian monastery of Hilendar. We know from him that while the various Orthodox monks of Mt. Athos—Greeks, Bulgars, Russians, Serbs and Vlachs—were frequently at loggerheads, yet the others even more frequently ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... you'll agree Not frenzied Dennis smote so fell as he; For El-n's Introduction, crabbed and dry, Like Churchill's Cudgel's {3} marked with ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... cared Little-Lovely Leila for seeing sights? Anybody could see sights—any dreary and dried-up fossil, any crabbed and cranky old maid—the Tower and Westminster Abbey were for those who had nothing better to do. As for herself, her horizon just now was bounded by primrose wreaths and fragrant boxes, and the promise of ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... "You bet he is! He's crusty as old crust. Don't you go up against my daddy with any little bank-book. It's got to be a fat wad, and, mind you, no cloves on your breath, either. He's crabbed on the drink question; that's why he settled in Colorado Springs. No saloons ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... though often requested thereto, had failed to comply; how she had inflicted personal chastisement on him for some trivial offence; and how, on reflecting what a kind-hearted old gentleman Mr. Hardesty was, and what a crabbed old thing Aunt Peggy was, he had repented of his theft, and determined to make restitution at the earliest opportunity; 'and there they are on you,' said Dick, in conclusion, 'and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... my sword and the charm had all flown out of window together and gone to join the Witch of Endor. But no, there he sat, and the sword before him, as if they never had stirred since I left. And the old man gave me a bit of parchment covered with crabbed Latin script, and told me I should find therein the sense of my two inscriptions, though there were words even he could not decipher. So I put the parchment in my pouch, and reached my hand to the sword, when he ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... is a very skilful elaboration of the Culex, a poem attributed, without reason, to Virgil. The original, which is crabbed and pedantic, where it is not unintelligible from corruption, is here rendered with sufficient fidelity to the sense, but with such perspicuity, elegance, and sweetness, as to make Spenser's performance too good a poem to be called a ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... my liege," said Ella, who hardly knew whether to smile or frown at the sarcastic petulance of his guest, who went on with a sly smile—"And now old Dunstan does not know where I am. He left me with a huge pile of books in musty Latin, or crabbed English, and I had to read this and to write that, as if I were no prince, but a scrivener, and had to get my living by my pen; but as soon as he was gone I had a headache, and persuaded my venerable uncle the king, through the ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Rachel to do the same thing, you know," the old lady went on, roused to fresh indignation at the thought of her great-niece, and she pulled her little cloth jacket down, and generally shook herself together. Crabbed age and jackets should not live together. Age should be wrapped in the ample and tolerant cloak, hider of frailties. It was not Aunt Anna's fault, however, if her garments were uncompromising and scanty of outline. Predestination reigns nowhere more strongly than in clothes, and ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... cheerfulness. One would imagine that old age ought to think of nothing but death, since it is condemned to give up all enjoyment; and that it is not attended by enough ugliness of its own, but must needs be slovenly and crabbed. ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... to purify the convention, or to dismiss one of its members, and it was a difficult step to get over, even for parties. Danton did not exonerate Marat. "I do not like him," said he; "I have had experience of his temperament; it is volcanic, crabbed and unsociable. But why seek for the language of a faction in what he writes? Has the general agitation any other cause than that of the revolutionary movement itself?" Robespierre, on his part, protested ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... from his own day to ours. In particular, his classification of the virtues, and his doctrine that virtue lies in a "mean," have dominated a vast amount of moral speculation. The treatises as we know them are so crabbed and condensed in style as to give the impression that they are to a large extent not the finished works, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... and obedient, it can be well understood that he was the pride and hope of his mother and aunt, whose circumstances were of the humblest nature. He attended the village school, where he was the most popular and promising of the threescore pupils under the care of the crabbed Mr. Jenkins. He was as active of body as mind, and took the lead among boys of his own age in athletic sports ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... notes of discord harsher, louder, and more frequent than any poet since Elizabethan times. Whatever we hold about the insight and imagination of Browning, no one can doubt that he often chose to be uncouth, crabbed, grotesque, and even clownish, when the humour was on him. There are high precedents for genius choosing its own instrument and making its own music. But, whatever were Browning's latent powers of melody, his method when he chose to play upon the gong, or the ancient instrument of marrow-bone ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... was when Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death, Ere I could make thee open thy white hand, And clap thyself my love: then didst thou utter, I'm ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... when she began to speak he exclaimed, "By the head of San Giovanni, it must be the little Tessa, and looking as fresh as a ripe apple! What! you've done none the worse, then, for running away from father Nofri? You were in the right of it, for he goes on crutches now, and a crabbed fellow with crutches is dangerous; he can reach across the house and beat a woman ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... unrolled a sheet of paper on which were a few lines in a rather crabbed hand; which Fred would once have said was just like the character of the whimsical old maid herself, but which he now knew ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... doctor's shoulders. The form taken by your aunt's delirium—I mean the apparent tendency of the words that escape her in that state—seems to excite some incomprehensible feeling in the mind of her crabbed servant. She wouldn't even let me go into the bedroom, if she could possibly help it. Did Mrs. Ellmother give you a warm welcome when ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... latest) in 1570. Everything, in fact, goes to show that he was out of favour with the University authorities. In the first place he seems to have paid small attention to his regular studies. To quote Wood again, he was "always averse to the crabbed studies of Logic and Philosophy. For so it was that his genie, being naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry (as if Apollo had given to him a wreath of his own Bays without snatching or struggling), did in a manner neglect academical ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... He was a farmer, and had two grown-up sons, one of whom kept a small flat-boat for fishing and gunning purposes. I saw the owner of the boat hoeing in the garden. Though I was hardly acquainted with him, I went to him and asked if he would lend me his boat for half an hour. I found he was a crabbed fellow, and was not disposed to oblige me. I told him that I was in a great hurry, that my own skiff was broken, and if he would lend me his I would give him a dollar for the use of her. The dollar opened his eyes and his heart, if he had any. He consented to the bargain, and ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... morning when she had gone to get it, before anything had happened and the lure of life had been so exquisite. Now that it had come near—if this indeed were life that she was laboring in—it was steep and crabbed, like the brown hills in summer, far off, like velvet, to climb, plowed ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... stretch of the term would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early divines of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals of sermon-writing, of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and similar grave trifles distinguished by the crabbed wit of the so-called "metaphysical poets," whose manner was in fashion when the Puritans left England; the manner of Donne and Cowley, and those darlings of the New-English muse, the Emblems of Quarles and ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Holy Virgin, his father turns him away from home. Complaining not, whimpering not, he goes. And hearing the bulbuls calling in the direction of Najma's house that evening, he repairs thither. But the crabbed, cruel uncle turns him away also, and bolts the door. Whereupon Khalid, who was then in the first of his teens, takes a big scabrous rock and sends it flying against that door. The crabbed uncle rushes out, blustering, cursing; the nephew takes up another of ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... adj.; acid, acidity, low pH; acetous fermentation, lactic fermentation. vinegar, verjuice^, crab, alum; acetic acid, lactic acid. V. be sour; sour, turn sour &c adj.; set the teeth on edge. render sour &c adj.; acidify, acidulate. Adj. sour; acid, acidulous, acidulated; tart, crabbed; acetous, acetose^; acerb, acetic; sour as vinegar, sourish, acescent^, subacid [Chem]; styptic, hard, rough. Phr. sour as a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... said:—"This is the work of a dull man grown whimsical"—a most characteristical account of Lord Kames as a writer.' Boswelliana, p. 278. Hume wrote of it:—'Some parts of the work are ingenious and curious; but it is too abstruse and crabbed ever to take with the public.' J. H. Burton's Hume, ii. 131. 'Kames,' he says, 'had much provoked Voltaire, who never forgives, and never thinks any enemy below his notice.' Ib, p. 195. Voltaire (Works, xliii. 302) thus ridicules ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... question of effective superintendence, as is true of model tenements, and everything else in this world. You have got to keep the devil out of everything, yourself included. He will get in if he can, as he got into the Garden of Eden. The play piers have taken a hold of the people which no crabbed old bachelor can loosen with trumped-up charges. Their civilizing influence upon the children is already felt in a reported demand for more soap in the neighborhood where they are, and ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... is all restless, but there's peace in grove and wood. No beadle here impounds you, to suit his crabbed mood; No strife profanes our little church, tho' there it rages high, But then we have no little church, and that, perhaps, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... Brook Street, where I found Jack expecting my return. He had bought, in honor of it, some cigars of special quality, over which I was to tell him all the story of Julia's wedding. But a letter was waiting for me, directed in queer, crabbed handwriting, and posted in Jersey a week before. It had been so long on the road in consequence of the bad penmanship of the address. I opened it carelessly as I answered Jack's first inquiries; but the instant I saw the signature I held up my hand to silence him. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... ugly and a very bad line. But people do not say that this proves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist and metaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form; they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifference to form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... an idea of the extraordinarily crabbed hand in which the notes are written, but it is worth while to see the original, for here is the first occasion upon which is laid down in clear and unequivocal words that the blood CIRCULATES. The lecture gave evidence of a skilled anatomist, well versed ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... It was a dull gray ground on which were drawn lines, shading off and blurring into each other, sometimes starting from the mist, and then sinking back into it again. Among all these lines there were stiff, crabbed, and cramped designs, as though they were drawn with a set-square—patterns with sharp corners, like the elbow of a skinny woman. There were patterns in curves floating and curling like the smoke of a cigar. But they were all enveloped ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... possible to consider Mr. Meredith—whose total yield of verse has been so scanty and the most of it so 'harsh and crabbed,' as not only 'dull fools' suppose—beside the great poets who have been his contemporaries, and to feel no impropriety in the comparison? That was the question X and I found ourselves ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... importance as throwing light upon the early customs of our race, and the laws of Ine may be considered as the foundation of modern English law. Many of these laws were probably much older; but they were now first codified and systematically enforced. The language employed is direct, almost crabbed; but occasionally the Anglo-Saxon love of figure shows itself. To illustrate, I quote, after Brooke, from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of convenience allowed the installation of electric light, there was no such concession made, and sconces on the walls held dim iron lamps, so that only those of the most acute vision were able to read. Even then reading was difficult, for the book-stand on the table contained nothing but a few crabbed black-letter volumes dating from not later than the early seventeenth century, and you had to be in a frantically Elizabethan frame of mind to be at ease there. But Mrs Lucas often spent some of her rare leisure moments in the smoking-parlour, playing on the virginal that stood in the ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... when she said she could not return thanks, Brougham undertook to do it for her, speaking in her person. He said, that 'She was very sorry to return thanks in such a dress, but unfortunately she had quarrelled in the morning with her maid, who was a very cross, crabbed person, and consequently had not been able to put on the attire she would have wished, and in the difficulty she had had recourse to her old friend Lord Brougham, who had kindly lent her his best wig and the coat which he wore upon state occasions.' After more nonsense ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... this morning, in the form (as Bashwood supposed) of a letter from Mr. Darch. The crabbed old lawyer acknowledges my letter in three lines. Before he takes any steps, or expresses any opinion on the subject, he wants evidence of identity as well as the evidence of the certificate; and he ventures to suggest that it may be desirable, before we go any ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... old banker in Paris, crabbed, stern, unrelenting to his debtors—shivered in his boots and ended in signing away half his fortune to her, and moved his family into a permanent chateau in the country, where he keeps himself busy with his shooting ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... the eighteenth year of his age, and fell immediately on the study of philosophy. 'Tis scarcely credible with how much ardour he surmounted the first difficulties of logic. Whatsoever his inclinations were towards a knowledge so crabbed and so subtle, he tugged at it with incessant pains, to be at the head of all his fellow students; and perhaps never any scholar besides himself could join together so much ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... dissolved by the horse's hoof and I was sore for its dissolution. There was none left now that could remember the old days of the team save Lingo, and he grew crusty and somewhat crabbed. He was still the guardian of the sled, still the insatiable hand-shaker, but he grew more and more unsocial with his mates, and we heard his short, sharp, angry double bark at night more frequently than we used to. He reminded me of the complaining owl in Gray's "Elegy." He resented ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... the sheet of paper she held out to me. It bore these words, written in the crabbed and somewhat uncertain hand which had ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... entertainment. It was beautiful to the sight, being richly bound in silk and gold embroidery; but on opening it she soon found that there was little pleasure to be got from it on account of the difficulty she found in reading the crabbed handwriting. After spending some minutes in trying to decipher a paragraph or two she threw the book in disgust ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... scared of no doctor's wife." They often said, "One man's as good as another—and a darn sight better." This motto, however, they did not commend to farmer customers who had had crop failures. The Yankee merchants were crabbed; and Ole Jenson, Ludelmeyer, and Gus Dahl, from the "Old Country," wished to be taken for Yankees. James Madison Howland, born in New Hampshire, and Ole Jenson, born in Sweden, both proved that they were free American citizens by grunting, "I don't know whether I got any or ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... and crabbed, I presume. I admitted that Paul Patoff, though not graceful in his movements, was a fine-looking fellow, with an undeniable distinction of manner; he had a pleasant voice, an extraordinary command of English, though he ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... forth wordes, but plaine, and redie to The voice. // deliuer the meaning of the minde: a voice, not softe, weake, piping, wommanishe, but audible, Face. // stronge, and manlike: a countenance, not werishe Stature. // and crabbed, but faire and cumlie: a personage, not wretched and deformed, but taule and goodlie Learnyng // for surelie, a cumlie countenance, with a goodlie ioyned // stature, geueth credit to learning, and authoritie ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... its way, and deposited her at the residence of Mrs. Levison. Mrs. Levison was nearly eighty years of age, and very severe in speech and manner, or, as Mrs. Vane expressed it, "crabbed." She looked the image of impatience when Isabel entered, with her cap pushed all awry, and pulling at the black satin gown, for Mrs. Vane had kept her waiting dinner, and Isabel was keeping her from her tea; and that does not ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... touches of grace and tenderness and kindly humour that somehow accompany the very roughest and most trenchant of the earlier ballads, like the bloom and fragrance that adorn the bristling thickets of the native whin on the slopes of the Eildons or Arthur Seat. The times were harsh and crabbed, and the song they yielded was like unto themselves. There are ballads of the Battle of Pentland, of Bothwell Brig, of Killiecrankie, and, to make a leap into another century, of Sheriffmuir. But they are memorable for the passion of ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... guesses pretty nearly." "What is it?" "I do not know anything about it. Mascaret leads a very fast life now, after having been a model husband. As long as he remained a good spouse, he had a shocking temper and was crabbed and easily took offense, but since he has been leading his present, rackety life, he has become quite indifferent; but one would guess that he has some trouble, a worm gnawing somewhere, for he ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... of Momus, played the Sheepstealer. Mr. West, whom we have mentioned in Hawbuck, played Old Snarl with great humour, which his audience, and indeed himself, seemed heartily to enjoy. In characters of low humour, particularly crabbed old men, Mr. West would be very pleasing, if he would aim less at raising gallery laughter by spurious means. And all that could be done for Mrs. Scout was ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... my fruits of the pear and quince kind, at least eight different sorts; but I found I could make nothing of them, for they were most of them as rough and crabbed after stewing as before, so I laid them all aside. Lastly, I boiled my ram's-horn and cream-cheese, as I called them, together. Upon tasting the latter of these, it was become so watery and insipid, I laid it aside as useless. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... upon this structure—a time when I probably knew as much about Carthusian convents as is needful for any of their inmates; when I studied Tromby's ponderous work and God knows how many more—ay, and spent two precious weeks of my life in deciphering certain crabbed MSS. of Tutini in the Brancacciana library—ay, and tested the spleenful Perrey's "Ragioni del Regio Fisco, etc.," as to the alleged land-grabbing propensities of this order—ay, and even pilgrimaged to Rome to consult ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... tangents, straight, If bread and butter wanted weight; And wisely tell what hour o' th' day The clock does strike by algebra. Beside, he was a shrewd philosopher, And had read ev'ry text and gloss over; Whate'er the crabbed'st author hath, He understood b' implicit faith: Whatever sceptic could inquire for, For every why he had a wherefore, Knew more than forty of them do, As far as words and terms could go. All which he understood by rote, And as occasion ...
— English Satires • Various
... Kentuckian, whose intellectual vigor, integrity of character, and legal ability had secured for him a nomination to the bench of the Supreme Court by President Adams, which, however, the Democratic Senate failed to confirm. Kept in the shade by Henry Clay, he became somewhat crabbed, but his was one of the noblest intellects of his generation. His persuasive eloquence, his sound judgment, his knowledge of the law, his lucid manner of stating facts, and his complete grasp of every ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... poison the sources of spiritual life and shrivel the soul. Generosity of heart and a genial good will towards all are absolutely essential to him who would possess fine manners. Here is a man who is cross, crabbed, moody, sullen, silent, sulky, stingy, and mean with his family and servants. He refuses his wife a little money to buy a needed dress, and accuses her of extravagance that would ruin a millionaire. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... August 8th.—I read old Biagio's preface to Dante, which, from its amazing classicality, is almost as difficult as the crabbed old Florentine's own writing. Worked at a rather elaborate sketch tolerably successfully, and was charmingly interrupted by having our landlady's pretty little child brought in to me. She is a beautiful baby, but will be troublesome enough by and by.... At the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... America, even before I went there, to know that there are a good many people there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America until it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... occasionally expressing a desire for the wanderer to return, and assume the burden of management. Instead of names, initials were employed to designate individuals referred to, and it was evident the recipient had been addressed at various places. That they were in the crabbed and peculiar handwriting of the old Judge was beyond all question, and the dates covered several years. I read them through carefully, puzzled ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... Wully, shrewd, brave, active Wully was more than a match for him, and not only saved his master's flock, but himself escaped with a whole skin. Everyone entertained a profound respect for him, and he might have been a popular pet but for his temper which, never genial, became more and more crabbed. He seemed to like Dorley, and Huldah, Dorley's eldest daughter, a shrewd, handsome, young woman, who, in the capacity of general manager of the house, was Wully's special guardian. The other members of Doricy's family Wully learned to tolerate, but the rest ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... power of these two writers, with all their eccentricities, that we see even more clearly that free-thought was, as it were, a fight between finger-posts. For it is the remarkable fact that it was the man who had the healthy and manly outlook who had the crabbed and perverse style; it was the man who had the crabbed and perverse outlook who had the healthy and manly style. The reader may well have complained of paradox when I observed above that Meredith, unlike most neo-Pagans, did in his way take Nature naturally. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... had dismissed the laborers to ask him what was the matter, when he responded by showing her a leaden tube with a cover, somewhat like the tube in which a soldier on furlough keeps his leave, from which he drew a yellow parchment covered with crabbed handwriting, and carefully unrolling it said, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... besides it is so jolly having nothing to do but watch the waves and the wind and learn to mind the helm. I have made great friends with all the sailors, and they are very nice fellows, all but one crabbed old Scotchman, who says, when he sees us on deck, 'ladies should always stay down stairs.' I crawled up stairs in the Bay of Biscay, because they said it was such a glorious sea, and, at first, I thought we were in a vast quarry of bright blue marble, all the broken ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... the exacting love of men. They had had more long voyages to make their names in than she had known weeks of carefully tended life, for a new ship receives as much attention as if she were a young bride. Even crabbed old dock-masters look at her with benevolent eyes. In her shyness at the threshold of a laborious and uncertain life, where so much is expected of a ship, she could not have been better heartened and comforted, had she only been able to hear and understand, than by the tone of deep conviction in ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... functions we had assumed lay cold and stiff in the little lonely room with candles at his head and his feet. During our railway journey to Chambery Blanquette told us in her artless way what she knew of his history. In the flesh he had been a crabbed and crotchety ancient addicted to drink. He had passed some years of his middle life in prison for petty thefts. In his youth—Blanquette's mind could not grasp the idea of Pere Paragot having once been young—he must have been an astonishing blackguard. He had been wont ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... in the bar, with a decidedly cross face, which argued ill for anyone who held converse with her that day; but as Slivers was quite as crabbed as she was, and, moreover, feared neither God nor man—much less a woman—he tackled her ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... the old man, "that's all right. Don't apologize, Boy, whatever you do. D'yer know what I came over hyar fer?" he asked suddenly reaching out a crabbed hand. "Well, I'll tell ye. I've be'n lookin' f'r years f'r a white man that I c'd swear off to. Not one of these pink-gilled preachers but a man that would shake hands with me on the squar' and hold me to ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... vehemently, 'I will be under obligation to no one. I have money to pay for two years in advance, and during this time I shall be able to earn sufficient to pay for the succeeding two years.' This softened the anger of the crabbed director; he was friendly and kind, and promised ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... again, covering his face with a big horny hand, and swinging one foot nervously. John opened the folded paper, and held it up to one of the tall lamps beside his desk, for the writing was dim and crabbed, and the light poor, and then read a call that the Session should meet immediately after the prayer-meeting. No object for consideration was named, and the paper was signed by Mr. Dean and another elder. John put it down, and, noticing ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... sore one, crabbed and-severe, Lieutenant Lon Lumbago, an arch scrutineer? Call the roll to-day, would he answer—Here! When the Blixum's fellows to quarters mustered How he'd lurch along the lane of gun-crews clustered, Testy as touchwood, to pry and to ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... like needles on the Duke's face. Through his brain there ran a succession of queries and speculations, and dominating them all one clear question-was he to gain anything by this strange conversation? Who was this great man with a name the same as his own, this crabbed nobleman with skin as yellow as an orange, and body like an orange squeezed dry? He surely meant him no harm, however, for flashes of kindliness had lighted the shrivelled face as he talked. His look was bent in piercing comment upon Philip, who, trying hard to solve the mystery, now made a tentative ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... can do it if you pay me my price," said the crabbed man, who was a local judge and ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... canst learn what language his purse speaks, Be ruled by that; that's golden eloquence. Money can make a slavering tongue speak plain. If he that loves thee be deform'd and rich, Accept his love: gold hides deformity. Gold can make limping Vulcan walk upright; Make squint eyes straight, a crabbed face look smooth, Gilds copper noses, makes them look like gold; Fills age's wrinkles up, and makes a face, As old as Nestor's, look as young as Cupid's. If thou wilt arm thyself against all shifts, Regard all men according to their gifts. This if thou practise, thou, when I am dead. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... my Gibbons—two editions, if you please, for my old complete one being somewhat crabbed in the print I could not resist getting a set of Bury's new six-volume presentment of the History. In reading that book you don't want to be handicapped in any way. You want fair type, clear paper, and a light volume. You are not to read it lightly, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... posthumous. He was a great artificer of title-pages, covering them with a promising luxuriance; and in this way recommended his works to the booksellers. He had an odd taste for running inscriptions of whimsical crabbed terms; the gold-dust of erudition to gild over a title; such as "Tetradymus, Hodegus, Clidopharus;" "Adeisidaemon, or the Unsuperstitious." He pretends these affected titles indicated their several subjects; but the genius of Toland could ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Frenchmen by no means unexampled, faculty of writing with almost equal ease and felicity in both French and English. His walk in life gives him a singularly catholic outlook. His learning is profound, but he is not overburdened by it, and he preserves his native gaiety of style even when solving crabbed problems of bibliography. He is at times discursive, but he is never tedious; and he shows no trace of that philological pedantry and narrowness or obliquity of critical vision which the detailed study ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... "when man becomes aware of the divine law, and recognises its claim on him." Here, again, it is easy to see how illuminating would be this conception of law for the Roman of Scipio's time. So far the Roman idea and study of law (as I have elsewhere expressed it)[792] had been of a crabbed, practical character, wanting in breadth of treatment, destitute of any philosophical conception of the moral principles which lie behind all law and government. The new doctrine called up life in these dry bones, and started ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... thoughts and sentiments offensive to the Church. In some the Florentine patriot spoke over-boldly. Others exposed their author to misconstruction on the score of personal morality.[6] All were ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed and obscure in thought—the rough-hewn blockings-out of poems rather than finished works of art, as it appeared to the scrupulous, decorous, elegant, and timorous Academician of a feebler age. While pondering these difficulties, and comparing the readings of his many manuscripts, the thought occurred ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... one I had then, 'n' yer pappy was erway from home all th' week, 'cept from Sat'day evenin' tell 'fore day Monday monrin'. Melindy White staid wi' me; she was Zekle's great-aunt, 'n' er ole maid, 'n' people did say she was monst'ous cross 'n' crabbed, but she warn't never cross ter me. I mind me of er Sat'day, 'n' I'd be spectin' of yer pappy home. I'd git up at th' fust cock-crow, 'n' go wake Melindy, 'n' she'd grumble 'n' laff all in er breath, 'n' say: 'Ann Elisabeth Tyler, ye're th' most onreasonablest ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... enthusiastically on her behaviour. She rode out a gale in five fathoms of water without shipping "even a sea that would come over the sole of your shoe." Running her into Ramsgate in a heavy sea, Grant wrote of her in terms that, though somewhat crabbed to a non-nautical ear, were a sailor's equivalent for fine poetry: "though it blew very strong, I found the vessel stand well up under sail, and with only one reef out of the topsails, no jib set, a lee tide going, when close hauled she ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... his wife, his child, the thick, bulky wedding ring on his finger, and the gelatinous mass of flesh on his neck. From that evening on he never again visited his sister. If Marguerite got up enough courage to visit him, he treated her with crabbed contempt. She finally came to the point where she would pass his door with not a ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Calista, "I like to work. Is Conrad always so crabbed? He hardly talked anything all the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... be a bit surprised if it turned out to be that crabbed old miser, Philip Adkins' big house!" ventured Joel; who had often come around this way on his wheel on errands, and ought to be as well acquainted with the locality as ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... thorny questions to him, and never failed to wonder at the readiness with which he brought back a task in which old Blondet found nothing to criticise. Michu was sure of the influence of the most crabbed aristocrats, and he was young and rich; he lived, therefore, above the level of departmental intrigues and pettinesses. He was an indispensable man at picnics, he frisked with young ladies and paid court to their mothers, he danced at balls, ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... note from Grylls. It was scribbled in a small, crabbed hand on the back of a business letter. On the other side Garth had a glimpse of the time-honoured formula: "Dear Sir: Yours of the first instant to hand, and contents noted. In reply we beg to say——" It gave him a queer, incongruous start: outside, it seemed, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... until the year forty-one—because the youth felt that the character of such a lovely girl was too exalted to inspire any other feeling than that of quiet reverence. But as lovers will not always be insulted, at all times and under all circumstances, by the frowns and cold looks of crabbed old age, which should continually reflect dignity upon those around, and treat the unfortunate as well as the fortunate with a graceful mien, he continued to use diligence and perseverance. All this lighted a spark in his heart that changed his whole character, and like the unyielding ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... I had known her the girl seemed fully to realize that regulated law was a force, and no bogey man which crabbed old grandfathers dangled before pleasure-loving girls, and for her running loose in the green pasture of life was at an end. The bit she must learn to wear would teach her to be bridle wise. However stupid, the process ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... ill-tempered, surly, churlish, disagreeable, ill-conditioned, morose, unamiable, crabbed, dogged, ill-humored, sour, unlovely, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... nature of their forest kindred, and have grown humanized by receiving the care of man as well as by contributing to his wants. There, is so much individuality of character, too, among apple trees, that it gives them all additional claim to be the objects of human interest. One is harsh and crabbed in its manifestations; another gives us fruit as mild as charity. One is churlish and illiberal, evidently grudging the few apples that it bears; another exhausts itself in free-hearted benevolence. The variety of ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you are not getting old. Not in the crabbed and MISANTHROPIC sense. On the contrary, when one is good, one becomes better, and, as you are already better than most others, you ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... old woman's fancy for Mr. Conway represents a relation of warm friendship that is of every-day occurrence between youth and age that is not crabbed."—The Examiner, ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... got the name of being a hard man and a money-grabber and a driver," said Chase with crabbed bitterness, "but who is it that gives that reputation to me? People that can't beat me and take advantage of me and work money out of me by their rascally schemes! I'm not a hard man by nature—my actions with you prove ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... in uneven rhythm, had given him a suggestion for an accompaniment. His mind was far away, working out his pattern of harmony, when another sound, actual, familiar, broke into his reverie—the preliminary chords of one of the songs of his "Sun-dial" cycle, "Youth and Crabbed Age." Then a woman began to sing. It was Stella's voice; he recognized it at once, pleasant, sufficiently trained. Stella was a fair musician and was fond of trying over new music, but to-day she was playing in a more musicianly manner than he had believed her capable ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... He had all the correct trappings for the frontier, and his toilet in the shed gave him pleasure. The sun came up, and with a stroke struck the world to crystal. The near sand-hills went into rose, the crabbed yucca and the mesquite turned transparent, with lances and pale films of green, like drapery graciously veiling the desert's face, and distant violet peaks and edges framed the vast enchantment beneath the liquid exhalations of the sky. The smell of bacon and coffee from open windows filled the heart ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... "I'm a crusty, lonesome, crabbed old chap," he said aloud, "but there's something about that little girl makes me feel young again . . . and it's such a pleasant sensation I'd like to have it repeated once ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... escape. And after a time the fires of the Cascades burned away; the inland sea was drained and its bed became a fair and habitable land, and still the waters gushed through the narrow crevices roaring seaward. But the Devil had one sorrow. All his children born before the catastrophe were crabbed, unregenerate, stiff-tailed fiends. After that event every new-born imp wore a flaccid, invertebrate, despondent tail—the very last insignium of ignobility. So runs the legend of The Dalles—a shining ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... She must mean her life with him! In a sudden, swift, pitying gleam of comprehension, I saw why my mother-in-law was so crabbed and disagreeable. Life had embittered her. I wondered miserably if my life with her son would leave similar marks upon ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... because of his facility for intrigue, his power of bullying, and his great influence at Court. As we have seen, the conciliatory efforts of the monarch had hitherto averted a rupture between Pitt and Thurlow. But not even the favour of George III could render the crabbed old Chancellor endurable. His spitefulness had increased since Pitt's nomination of Pepper Arden to the Mastership of the Rolls; and he showed his spleen by obstructing Government measures in the House of Lords. In April 1792 he flouted Pitt's efforts on ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... of it— If Goulburn junior should be bit By some insane Dissenter, roaming Thro' Granta's halls, at large and foaming, And with that aspect ultra crabbed Which marks Dissenters when they're rabid! God only knows what mischiefs might Result from this one single bite, Or how the venom, once suckt in, Might spread and rage thro' kith and kin. Mad folks ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... mortal man would have time to read it; but I must hurry on with my story; for truth to tell, my eyes are beginning to be not quite what they have been,—they'll serve my time, I hope, but my writing was always small and crabbed,—and I must say what I have to say, shorter than I have begun, I perceive. After the first week, then, which he spent with Father L'Homme-Dieu, Yvon came over to our village and boarded with Abby Rock. The Father was pleased to have him ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... blindfolded, but was broad awake again and staring; insomuch, Sir, that if Joe's father were to rise up from the grave to-morrow, he wouldn't trust the old blade with a penny piece, but would tell him that his son Josh was too old a soldier to be done again, Sir. That he was a suspicious, crabbed, cranky, used-up, J. B. infidel, Sir; and that if it were consistent with the dignity of a rough and tough old Major, of the old school, who had had the honour of being personally known to, and commended by, their late Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Kent and York, to ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... be well ware, Take example now by me; Or else affirme well I dare Ye shall be dead, ye shall not flee; Be crabbed, void humilitie, Or Chichevache ne will not fail You for to swallow in ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... Christmas" of the bells is flung out to all however poor. Beside Trinity there are but few chimes of bells in the city, neither do poor children there sing Christmas carols in the streets and thus unlatch the doors of even crabbed hearts. ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... sea-mist overflowed the cliff, wallowing and billowing like an oceanic invasion, over the face of the moor. Whitefoot brought back hidden in his collar the simple message, "I shall be there," signed with the well-known crabbed fist of "Adam Ferris," traditional in his family for some hundreds of years, which seemed completely identical with signatures in the ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... turn to kindlier themes; it is pleasant to think of the legitimate rejoicings and kindnesses in which the most staid of us may indulge. Far be it from me to emulate the crabbed person who proposed to form a "Society for the Abolition of Christmas." The event to be commemorated is by far the greatest in the history of our planet; all others become hardly worthy of mention when we think of it; and nothing more momentous can happen until ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... who lovedst me, for many a day, For many a paradisal day, ere yet I saw that lean fool with the grizzled beard Who's gone a-questing for his true wife's lute?" And he made answer: "I had come erenow, But that my father, dying, left a load Of cumbrous duties I had needs perform— Dry, peevish, crabbed business at the best, Impertinences indispensable, Accumulated dulness, if you will, Such as I would not irk your ears withal: Howbeit I came at last, and nigh a week Have tarried in the region hereabouts, Unknown—and yearning for one glimpse ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... going!" cried Charlie Star, turning to watch it. "Oh, it's going to break one of Mr. Morrison's windows!" Mr. Morrison was a rather crabbed, cross old man who had a house on the edge of the vacant lots where the boys ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Keeping Store • Laura Lee Hope
... part, I think the most awful thing is to have somebody one loves keep secrets from one. No wonder folks get crabbed and spiteful with ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... conspirators, soldiers, priests, flamens, &c. And so, after the ungallant fashion of theatrical play-wrights, as to a class inferior to the very &c. of masculines—(of less intention withal than one of those &cs. of crabbed Littleton, like an old shoe fricasseed into savourings of all things by its inimitable Coke,)—come we to the women-kind. Agrippina, (one of the school of Siddons,) empress-mother, a strong-minded, Lady-Macbeth sort of woman, and the only person in the world who can awe her amiable son. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... such mark, the fancy is left to devise a romance about the first owner, and all the hands through which the book has passed. That Vanini came from a Jesuit college, where it was kept under lock and key. That copy of Agrippa "De Vanitate Scientiarum" is marked, in a crabbed hand and in faded ink, with cynical Latin notes. What pessimist two hundred years ago made his grumbling so permanent? One can only guess, but part of the imaginative joys of the book-hunter lies ' in the fruitless conjecture. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... in luxury, he will keep him out of society, he will deprive him of parents, friends, money, knowledge, and of every other good, that he may have him all to himself. Then again his ways are not ways of pleasantness; he is mighty disagreeable; 'crabbed age and youth cannot live together.' At every hour of the night and day he is intruding upon him; there is the same old withered face and the remainder to match—and he is always repeating, in season or out of season, the praises or ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... Roberts was not without some humanism, if such a word may be used; certainly he never gave away a penny, but as certainly he cheated no man. He was upright in conduct, and not unpleasant in manner. He could not have been utterly crabbed for this one labourer, Bill, to stay with him five-and-twenty years. This was the six-and-twentieth year they had dwelt there together in the gaunt, grey, lonely house, with woods around them, isolated from the world, and without a hearth. A hearth is ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... is for the best. I submit, also, to the advertisements in large letters, but under protest, and with a kind of ostrich-longing for concealment. Most of the third volume is given to the development of the 'crabbed Professor's' character. Lucy must not marry Dr. John; he is far too youthful, handsome, bright-spirited, and sweet-tempered; he is a 'curled darling' of Nature and of Fortune, and must draw a prize in life's lottery. His wife must be young, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
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