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More "Gibbet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... river, Bobadilla beheld on either bank a gibbet with the body of a Spaniard hanging on it, apparently but lately executed. He considered these as conclusive proofs of the alleged cruelty of Columbus. Many boats came off to the ship, every one being anxious to pay early court to this public censor. Bobadilla remained on board all day, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... white handkerchief. Immediately the old Captain was seized by Cossacks and dragged to the gibbet. Astride the cross-beam of the gallows, sat the mutilated Bashkirs who we had questioned; he held a rope in his hand, and I saw, an instant after, poor Ivan Mironoff suspended in the air. Then Ignatius ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... a moral, a peaceable, a virtuous, a religious people, moved by the most virtuous and religious instincts, felt themselves coerced to execrate as a cowardly and revolting crime the act of state policy consummated on the Manchester gibbet. In fine, the country was up in moral revolt against a deed which the perpetrators themselves already felt to be of evil character, and one which they fain would blot for ever from ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... trusted for the religious reunion of her subjects was foiled; and the English Catholics, fined, imprisoned at every crisis of national danger, and deprived of their teachers by the prison and the gibbet, were severed more hopelessly than ever from the national Church. A fresh impulse was thus given to the growing current of opinion which was to bring England at last to recognize the right of every man to freedom both of conscience and of ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... Philip were hung to the branches of a tree. The head was stuck upon a gibbet at Plymouth for twenty years. The hand was kept at Boston. Caleb Cook traded with Alderman for King Philip's gun; and King Philip's wife and little boy were sold as ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... might put me on track of that One Great Ultimate and Final True Thing I am purposed to say about Christmas. Don't ask me yet what that Thing is. Truth dwells in no man, but is a shy beast you must hunt as you may in the forests that are round about the Walls of Heaven. And I do hereby curse, gibbet, and denounce in execrationem perpetuam atque aeternam the man who hunts in a crafty or calculating way—as, lying low, nosing for scents, squinting for trails, crawling noiselessly till he shall come near to his quarry and then taking careful aim. Here's to him who hunts Truth ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... Francois Villon and Francois Villon I, We both would mock the gibbet which the law has lifted high; HE in his meagre, shabby home, I in my roaring den— HE with his babes around him, I with my hunted men! His virtue be his bulwark—my genius should be mine!— "Go, fetch my pen, sweet Margot, and a jorum of ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain and snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo will think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle in "Ninety-three," to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland, when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs" escapes ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... sometimes burned; but thieves are hanged (as I said before) generally on the gibbet or gallows, saving in Halifax, where they are beheaded after a strange manner, and whereof I find this report. There is and has been of ancient time a law, or rather a custom, at Halifax, that whosoever does commit any felony, and is taken with the same, or confesses the fact upon examination, ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... has ever been able to be impartial. The present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything more of its tremendous essence, ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... in new-made graves, bloody corpses of young men, The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud, And all these things bear fruits, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... indignation at your second attempt upon Don Rebiera induces us to offer; for if you escape from him you will have to do with me. On the whole, Don Silvio, you may think yourself fortunate, for it is better to die by the hands of a gentleman than by the gibbet." ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... allow it merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... so! Young rascal! I want to consult you about him, if you dont mind. Shall we stroll over to the Gibbet? Bentley is too fast for me as a walking companion; but I ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... bountiful Prince, has ever been disposed, in times past, to treat these, his subjects, by the best and sweetest means." There being, however, room for an opinion that so bountiful a prince might have discovered sweeter means, by all this pondering, than to burn and gibbet his subjects by thousands, it was thought proper to insinuate that his orders had been hitherto misunderstood. Alva and Requesens had been unfaithful agents, who did not know their business, but it was to be set right ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been already unravelled by previous historians. Fitzjames was able, however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive guillotine without troubling the judges. Even in 1880 there existed ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... expression of terror upon it, of which I have never imagined the like. It seemed as if the man, whoever he was, was being forcibly lifted, with his arms somehow pinioned or held back, towards the little gibbet on the stage. I could just see the nightcapped head behind him. Then there was a cry and a crash. The whole show-box fell over backwards; kicking legs were seen among the ruins, and then two figures—as some said; I can only answer for ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... to create a hard and living piece of work. The one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier," Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos." He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, has ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... lever with which England is undermining Al-Islam," cried a voice in India. "A base one in the service of some European coalition, who, under the pretext of preaching the spiritualities, is undoing the work of the Revolution. The gibbet is for ordinary traitors; for him the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... rafters a' did dirl.— Coffins stood round like open presses, That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And, by some devilish cantrip slight, Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; A knife, a father's throat had mangled, Whom his ain son o' life bereft, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... much a madness as a folly of the people. Unlike other notions that sprang from the belief in witchcraft, and which we have already dwelt upon at sufficient length, it has sent no wretches to the stake or the gibbet, and but a ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... door, the fire was also slowly fading from the sky and the mountain ridge whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects—mere black silhouettes against the sky—which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless occasionally cast an impatient glance in that direction, as ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... that held the knife drawn back against his breast. Knowing them, he saw no use in any appeal; also he saw that it was indeed her life or theirs. On the one hand, the downfall of all their hopes, the death or perpetual enslavement of many, and for himself surely the gibbet and the rope; on ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... was exposed to the insults of the populace, and finally was hung up by the feet on a gibbet. A cousin of Coligni secretly caused it to be ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... toil; and, for threescore years, has buffeted against Fate's obstruction and men's perfidy, like genius and courage amid poltroonery, dishonesty and commonplace; faithfully enduring and endeavouring,—O Parlement of Paris, dost thou reward it with a gibbet and a gag? (9th May, 1766: Biographie Universelle, para Lally.) The dying Lally bequeathed his memory to his boy; a young Lally has arisen, demanding redress in the name of God and man. The Parlement of Paris does its utmost to defend the indefensible, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Charles I., nor that in a remote branch of my family there exists a claimant to an earldom, nor that an uncle of mine used to own a dog that was descended from the dog that was in the Ark; and at the same time I was never able to persuade myself to call a gibbet by its right name when accounting for other ancestors of mine, but always spoke of it as the "platform"—puerilely intimating that they were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... three went heavily up the grandiose stairway as if a gibbet waited at the top. They went into Sir Joseph's room, which adjoined that of his wife. Mr. Verrinder paused on ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... Lane, ma'am, where the gibbet used to stand," replied John, who was bringing in the muffins. "It's no nonsense, my lady. Every word as that man says comes ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficiently expressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks of oil- wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the myriad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment into the quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like baleful suns. But why should I be so violent of phrase against these guiltless means ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the end," said Sir Richard feebly. "God has been good to me beyond my deserts, and this is a crowning mercy. Consider, Justin, it might have been the gibbet and a crowd—instead of this snug bed, and you and Bentley here—just ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... and his companions," says Chevalier, "had incurred the necessity of signalizing themselves by some great exploit. They had committed a fault which the laws of all states treated as crime, and one that the leaders must expiate on the gibbet and their followers at the galleys, unless atoned for by brilliant deeds. Their departure from Cuba was an act of flagrant rebellion." In his great haste to get away from Cuba he embarked in nine small vessels, the largest not over one hundred tons and ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... they call "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... observation, loud enough, from the top of the table, 'Hah, Walrave, I see you are making yourself acquainted with the RAVENS in time, that they may not be strange to you at last,'"—when they come to eat you on the gibbet! (not a soft tongue, the Old Dessauer's). "Another day, seeing Walrave seated between two Jesuit Guests, the Prince said: 'Ah, there you are right, Walrave; there you sit safe; the Devil can't get you there!' As the Prince kept continually bantering him in this strain, Walrave determined not to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hear one cry sent Even from the hideous gibbet height, 'Praise to the Lord Omnipotent, The vultures ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... not propose, O valiant grave-diggers, to depreciate your merits; such is far from being my intention. I have that in my notes, on the other hand, which will do you more honour than the story of the gibbet and the Frog; I have gleaned, for your benefit, examples of prowess which will shed a new lustre ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... Walls of sharp rock rise up over eight hundred feet high round some of its sunken lakes—one is called the Powder Lake—and the level above this abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with herds of lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral, gibbet-looking signposts, shaped like a rough [Symbol: T] and set in a heap of loose stones. It is a great contrast to turn aside from this landscape and look on the smiling villages and pretty wooded scenery of the valley of the Mosel proper; the long lines of handsome, healthy women washing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... life and immortality? especially when we have so miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable punishment ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... thither from great distances. They were, however, often surprised, cut to pieces by the dragoons, who hung part of the prisoners on the neighbouring trees, and took the others to prison, from whence they were sent to the galleys, or hung on the nearest public gibbet. ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... your leg that was shot at Quebec and Saratoga," said the plucky and witty officer, "and bury it with the honors of war, and hang the rest of your body on a gibbet." ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... exclaimed "Mercy!" as she looked at the sheet; for while I knew not, then, the strange device upon the paper, I knew, by and by, that it was a gibbet. Beneath it were the words: "Money thirst shall burn like ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... and conversed in undertone, encouraging each other to stand firm. Each held a crucifix and pressed it to his lips, repeating the creed. Halfway across to the gibbet, they were stopped, the crucifixes torn from their hands, and their priestly robes stripped from them. There they stood, clad only in scant underclothes, in sight of the mob that seethed and mocked. Sharp sticks were thrust up between the crevices of the board walk, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the Liberator left the city. That night the bleaching skeleton of the venerable patriot Hermano was taken down from the gibbet where it had hung so long, by hands that left the revolutionary banner waving proudly in its place. This was an event to startle the viceroy. It was followed by other events. In a few days more and the sounds of insurrection were heard throughout the province—the city still moving secretly—sending ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... knightly, and I shall look to it that thou have thy reward. And now I rede thee go not to the Burg of the Four Friths; for this tale of thee shall get about and they shall take thee, if it were out of the very Frith-stool, and there for thee should be the scourge and the gibbet; for they of that Burg be robbers and murderers merciless. Yet well it were that thou ride hence presently; for those be behind my tormentors whom thou hast slain, who will be as an host to thee, and thou mayst not deal with them. ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... at the head of which stands Professor Tyndall's house with its famous screen. Hardly a mile away northward lies the Devil's Punch Bowl, with its memorial stone erected in abhorrence of the detestable murder perpetrated on its rim by ruffians whose corpses slowly rotted as they swung on the gibbet overhead; far to the south spreads the glorious amphitheatre of hills which constitute the Highlands ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... or the surly grace; But, lost in thoughtless ease and empty show, Behold the warriour dwindled to a beau; Sense, freedom, piety, refin'd away, Of France the mimick, and of Spain the prey. All that at home no more can beg or steal, Or like a gibbet better than a wheel; Hiss'd from the stage, or hooted from the court, Their air, their dress, their politicks, import; [p]Obsequious, artful, voluble and gay, On Britain's fond credulity they prey. No gainful trade their industry can 'scape, [q]They sing, they dance, clean ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... The ideas they pretend to stand for hold them in scorn. The imagination whose pictures they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there was a grand old republican in the realm ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... know Extorted from his fellow-creature's woe. Here while the courtier glitters in brocade, There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. The dome where pleasure holds her midnight reign Here, richly decked, admits the gorgeous train: Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy! Sure these denote one universal ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... off daily; swept away by that other grand mistake of man-kind—'Exemplary punishment is necessary'—So they say—But no—'Tis exemplary reformation! Can the world be better warned by a body in gibbets, than by the active virtues of a once misguided but now enlightened understanding? The gibbet will remain an object of terror to the traveller, who dreads being robbed and murdered; but an incitement to despair, in the mind of the murderer!—Banish then these black pictures from your mind, by which it continues darkened ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... committed a wrong, and wished to make restitution; or they had left debts which they were anxious to pay; or they had advice, or warnings, or threats to communicate; or they had been murdered, and were determined to bring their assassins to the gibbet. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... sleep in anything but pineapple bed; won't sit in anything but carved chair; can't pray without prie-dieu. If spurious will publicly gibbet you and probably burn your house down. Hold ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... at nightfall left the cottage in Danny's company. Two hours afterwards Hardress himself arrived in a fit of compunction. On learning that they had departed, he swore to himself that if this his servant exceeded his views, he would tear his flesh from his bones, and gibbet him as a miscreant ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and crime as they were incapable of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... poor souls love one another so! And then my little grandchildren, the gibbets, Promising children as you ever saw,— The young playing at hanging, the elder learning How to hold radicals. They are well taught too, 215 For every gibbet says its catechism And reads a select chapter in the Bible Before it goes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... 'A gibbet, by the look of it,' said Saxon, peering across at the gaunt framework of wood, which rose up from a little knoll. 'Let us ride past it, for it is little out of our way. They are rare things in England, though by my faith there were more gallows than milestones when Turenne was in the Palatinate. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lay the ways, a woeful path they found, and their sister's son wounded on a gibbet, wind-cold outlaw-trees,[122] on the town's west. Ever vibrated the ravens' whet: there ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... in a blazing temper," remarked Hamilton. "Lee and Ramsay and Stewart were like to have died of fright. I wish to God he'd strung the first to a gibbet!" ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... of a lawyer. How could it be otherwise with those who may be called the outlaws of the human race? They did but justify the seeming paradox of the traveller's exclamation, who, when at length, after a dreary passage through the wilderness, he came in sight of a gibbet, returned thanks that he had now arrived at a civilized country. "The pastoral tribes," says the writer I have already quoted, "who were ignorant of the distinction of landed property, must have disregarded ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... making the Chinese (if a trifle too ceremonious) the politest people on earth. Out of their myths and chronicles he extracted a trustworthy history, and by his treatment of vice he made princes tremble, lest their heads should be exposed on the gibbet of history. He gave much time to editing the music of the ancients, but his work in that line has perished. This, however, cannot be regarded as a very great loss, in view of the rude condition in which Chinese music is still found. However deficient ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... see, what is the best road to show you? Aye, which? Ah! there's the road of the gibbet and the rope. Go ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Cotter's Saturday Night" into it, and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban: the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn: the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rispah beneath the gibbet: Sisera bowing in weariness: Saul—great Saul—by the tent-prop with the ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... flibberty-gibbet. She'd much better get married. She's not much use in the world at present. Now if she was a doctor ... or ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... witnesses were examined. The juries spoke from their personal knowledge. Thus each convict was condemned on the oaths of thirty-six men. At first, on account of the multitude of executions, the condemned were beheaded: afterward they were hanged and left on the gibbet as objects of terror; but as their bodies were removed by their friends, the King ordered them to be hanged in chains, the first instance in which express mention of the practice is made. According to Holinshed the executions amounted to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... long, for an adroit professor of legerdemain has taken aim with a hooked stick, and by one slight jerk, will convey it to his own pocket. The profession of a gentleman in a round wig is determined by a gibbet chalked upon his coat. An enraged barber, who lifts up his stick in the corner, has probably been refused payment of a wager, by the man at whom he ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... pavement was torn up, and a rope fastened round the neck of the corpse, which was then dragged through the streets by the infuriated mob; and the desecrated remains of the recently powerful favourite were hung by the feet to a gibbet, dismembered in the most brutal manner, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... be hanged with his face toward the people, but a female with her face toward the gibbet. So says Rabbi Eliezer; but the sages say the man only is hanged, not the woman. Rabbi Eliezer retorted, "Did not Simeon the son of Shetach hang women in Askelon?" To this they replied, "He indeed caused ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... race. Poisoners, assassins, and incendiaries by profession may be exterminated wherever they are seized; for they attack and injure all nations by trampling under foot the foundations of their common safety. Thus pirates are brought to the gibbet by the first into whose hands they fall. If the sovereign of the country where crimes of that nature have been committed reclaims the authors of them in order to bring them to punishment, they ought to be restored to him, as to one who is principally ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... culminating point being Mt. Fenouillet, 981 ft., at the western extremity. The path to it, which skirts the whole ridge, commences at the back of the castle, just under the peak of La Potence, 633 ft., on which is a fragment of a tower. Agibbet for the execution of malefactors stood there, hence the name. The small hill above the east end of Hyres, and standing between the old and new cemeteries, is a favourite walk, and commands a good view. Before descending ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... a yet more close attack, the Commissioners, on the eve of one of the Fiend's Sabbaths, placed the gibbet on which they executed their victims just on the spot where Satan's gilded chair was usually stationed. The devil was much offended at such an affront, and yet had so little power in the matter that he could only express his resentment by threats that ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... there! What yonder swings And creaks 'mid whistling rain?" "Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel; A murd'rer ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... liberally as he promised, but though his money was taken there was no good result. At length the day arrived when the executions were to take place. A stage was erected with a gibbet on it and huge casks of water. Below, on the solid ground, stakes with chains were driven into the ground; while near the gibbet was a post with a chain in which those who were to be mercifully strangled before being thrown ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... as give, except in giant, gigantick, gibbet, gibe, giblets, Giles, gill, gilliflower, gin, ginger, gingle, to which may be ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... sedition." Hence their sanguinary conflicts with the good citizens of Paris, to whom they were wholly obnoxious, and who occasionally repaid their aggressions with interest. In 1407 two of their number, convicted of assassination and robbery, were condemned to the gibbet, and the sentence was carried into execution; but so great was the uproar occasioned in the university by this violation of its immunities that the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, was compelled to take down their bodies ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... soul grew serene, and by degrees returned to its heavenly source. He regained the idea of his mission, in his death he saw the salvation of the world; the hideous spectacle spread at his feet melted from his sight, and profoundly united to his Father, he began upon the gibbet the divine life which he was to live in the heart of humanity ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... was made to taste and smell the fruits and he could not but admit that it was even so as they had avouched. Then said the boy-Kazi to the boy-defendant, " 'Tis clear thou art a rogue and a rascal, and thou hast done a deed wherefor thou richly deservest the gibbet." Hearing this the children frisked about and clapped their hands with glee and gladness, then seizing hold of him who acted as the merchant of Baghdad, they led him off as to execution. The Commander of the Faithful, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... engine is called, and it derives its vile name from him. Now, with all these crimes upon him, does he not deserve death, nay, many deaths? For my part I know none bad enough but that supplied by his own shape —that shape which he gave to the gibbet named Stayros ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... column [the insignia of jurisdiction] or gibbet of stone, which is usually placed at the entrances of towns or villages; on which are ignominiously exposed the heads of persons executed or of criminals" ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... herself paramount not only in political but also in religious matters? And, because she was called queen, can it be considered treason for an Irishman to believe in the spiritual supremacy of the Pope? Yet, unless we look upon as martyrs those who died on the rack and the gibbet in Ireland during her reign, because they refused to admit in a woman the title of Vicar of Christ, to such decision must ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... himself, and printed at his particular desire. But this was not all. The artful author further arranged that when Sheppard reached his place of execution, he should send for a friend to the cart as he stood under the gibbet, and deliver a copy of the pamphlet as his last speech and dying confession. A paragraph recording this incident was duly inserted in the newspapers. It is a crowning illustration of the inventive daring with which Defoe practised ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... was condemned to death on the gibbet. His goods were confiscated to the State. His house in Monza was destroyed, and a pillar of infamy recording his crimes, was erected on its site. A proclamation of outlawry was issued on April 5, 1608, under the seal of Don Pietro de Acevedo, Count ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... but he be more a king than Henry himself. God speed the day of his coronation, when, before the very eyes of the Plantagenet hound, a black cap shall be placed upon his head for a crown; beneath his feet the platform of a wooden gibbet ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... quiet swinging led us very modestly, as it came and went on the wind, loud and low pretty regularly, even as far as the foot of the gibbet where the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... against the hand that has fed, that has clothed him, that has cherished him in sickness; that hand which before he became a pupil of your school, he had been accustomed to press with respectful affection. You have done all this—and then show him the gibbet and the wheel, as incentives to a sullen, repugnant obedience. God forbid, sir, that the Southern States should ever see an enemy on their shores, with these infernal principles of French fraternity in the van. While talking of taking Canada, some of us are ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... astonishingly adroit, the king was ridiculously clumsy. 6. Perkin himself confessed his imposture more than once, and read his confession to the people, and renewed his confession at the foot of the gibbet on which he was executed.—Answer. I have shown that this confession was such an aukward forgery that lord Bacon did not dare to quote or adhere to it, but invented a new story, more specious, but equally inconsistent with, probability. 7. After Henry the Eighth's ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... Plantagenet, the wise and the noble? Or is it some lovesick woman who cares not for her own fame in comparison of the life of her paramour? Now, by King Henry's soul! little hinders but I order thy minion's skull to be brought from the gibbet, and fixed as a perpetual ornament by the crucifix in ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... did last year. The tories are all ashamed of this, as they were of that; the author is not yet certainly known, though I think I am within a week of detecting him for certain. If I should, I shall try to cure him once for all, by stringing him up, not bodily, but in such a way as shall gibbet his memory in terrorem. It lies between Bernard, Waterhouse, and Jonathan Sewall. The first, they say, has not wit enough to write anything; the second swears off; and the third must plead guilty or not guilty as soon as I see him. Till matters are settled in England, I dare not leave this town, ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... I know that I am so, and I am proud of being so. To obtain the rank I possess I have respected no human laws, and I bid defiance to all Divine vengeance. I might be murdered or hanged, but it is impossible to degrade me. On a gibbet or in the palace of a Prince, seized by the executioner or dining with Sovereigns, I am, I will, and I must, always remain the same. Infamy cannot debase me, nor is it in the power of grandeur to exalt me." General, Ambassador, Field-marshal, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... prince rose to the occasion, and directed several of his nobles to forcibly drag the Earl of March from the apartments of the guilty pair, and in 1330 he became the Earl of Double-Quick March—a sort of forced March—towards the gibbet, where he was last seen trying to stand on the English climate. The queen was kept in close confinement during the rest of her life, and the morning papers of that time contained nothing of a social nature ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... she had often heard the gibbet creaking As it swayed in the lightning flash, Had caught from the neighbouring town a small child's shrieking At the cart-tail under ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... James; he is a sweet gentleman.' Again, on the following morning, she fell at his feet, beseeching his royal clemency, when he spurned her from him, saying, 'John James, that rogue, he shall be hanged; yea, he shall be hanged.' And, in the presence of his weeping friends, he ascended from the gibbet to the mansions of the blessed. His real crime was, that he continued to preach after having been warned not to do so by John Robinson, lieutenant of the Tower, properly called, by Mr. Crosby,[233] a devouring wolf, upon whose head the blood of this and other innocent Dissenters will be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Cartier, and about fifty of their number perished before the coming of the spring. Their lot was rendered more dreadful still by quarrelling and crime. Roberval could keep his colonists in subjection only by the use of irons and by the application of the lash. The gibbet, reared beside the fort, claimed its toll of ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... ghostly Nun of the garden had once been seen here. A partial darkness obscured one end, across which, as for deeper mystery, an old russet curtain was drawn, by way of screen to a sombre band of winter cloaks, pendent each from its pin, like a malefactor from his gibbet. From amongst these cloaks, and behind that curtain, the Nun was said to issue. I did not believe this, nor was I troubled by apprehension thereof; but I saw a very dark and large rat, with a long tail, come ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... surprised several bodies of peasants and utterly defeated them. The prisoners taken were brought before him, and putting off the complete armour which he wore, he heard the confession of his captives, gave them absolution, and then sent them straight to the gibbet. With the return of the peasants to their homes the gentlemen from the country were able to come with their retainers to town, and Richard found himself at the head of ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... held, according to the annual custom, on the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts erected at Serampore, but we hear that amongst the swingers was one female. A man fell from a stage thirty cubits high and broke his back; and another fell from a swinging post, but was not much hurt. Some days after ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs quail, to think of. The terrible descriptions were ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... gibbet! You always manage me. Well, let us rather go to the 'pater' than to the rabbi; but at least let my servants keep ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... This celebrated gibbet was, in the memory of the last generation, still standing at the western end of the town of Crieff, in Perthshire. Why it was called the kind gallows we are unable to inform the reader with certainty; but ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... awful bar to which you now strive prematurely to consign this noble, this gallant young man! Should you succeed, you must meet him there. Could you, in the presence of Almighty God—He who knows the inmost thoughts—justify your work of to-day? His mandate is not to the gibbet. Eternal Justice dictates there, whose decrees are eternal. Do you think of this? Do you defy it? If not—if you invoke it, do it through your acts toward your fellow-man. Have you to-day done unto this man as you would he should do unto you? I pause for a reply—none. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... neighbourhood in 1655, and Monmouth, in 1685, marched through Chard en route, as he thought, for the throne, a circumstance which Jeffreys did not allow the town to forget. "Hangcross tree," which once stood near the L. & S.W. station, was long locally reputed to be the gibbet on which some of the Duke's sympathisers expiated their treason. The town is nowadays chiefly dependent upon a large lace works and some collar factories. The church, which stands in the "old town" (turn down Axminster Road), is said to have been erected about 1400, and ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... also, for in 1331 a woman named Duplas was scourged and buried alive at Abbeville, and in 1460 Perotte Mauger, a receiver of stolen goods, was inhumed by order of the Provost of Paris in front of the public gibbet. In Germany in the good old days certain kinds of female criminals were "impaled," a punishment too grotesquely horrible for description, but likely enough considered by the simple German of the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... that Murray cancelled the tavern licenses; and any man convicted of that offence received twenty lashes every morning until he divulged the name of the liquor-seller. Theft and pillage were strenuously dealt with, one man expiating his offence upon the citadel gibbet. Finding that many of his soldiers were deserting, the General banished from the city certain priests whom he suspected of intrigue. On the other hand, he proved a generous friend to those well-disposed Canadians who had laid down their arms and maintained their ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... indifference; his horse is loaded with a heavy pack, against which the rider comfortably leans, while he puts a long horn to his lips. He has no sword, or any weapon of defence; but the two grisly figures by the roadside dangling on a gibbet, and his own inimitable expression of contented ease, seem to imply that travelling is secure for him, ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... abbey on the queerest principles; and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her, alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet.[9] Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He could string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he could make himself useful in many other ways. The whole ragged army ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Robert Bovill' What in Heaven's name did one of Coffyn blood with Robert? If ever man had a devil, 'twas he. I mind his sullen black face and his beard in two prongs. I have heard he is dead—on a Panama gibbet?" ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... he commended to his scholars, and to Ireland, the spirit which he desired to see expressed in "that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet." Strange country, that has the gibbet always before the eyes and almost before the aspiration of its idealists! It was so yesterday—in all the yesterdays—and yet the reason is plain. All the aspirations of such idealists have been regarded as criminal ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... of lifting the knife that should dismember the British Empire. The royal government would mark that man as an arch-rebel, and all its energies would be brought to bear to quench his spirit, or to hang him on a gibbet.[1] ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... round about, rather than miss the opportunity of halting for a few minutes on the vacant esplanade of Holyrood, or under the darkest shadows of the Castle rock, where it overhangs the Grassmarket, and the huge slab that still marks where the gibbet of Porteous and the Covenanters had its station. His coachman knew him too well to move at a Jehu's pace amidst such scenes as these. No funeral hearse crept more leisurely than did his landau up the Canongate or the Cowgate; and not ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... fear not. He is very headstrong, and would rather have his joke on the gibbet than ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... conspiracy of the villains was revealed, as it was shown how, in anticipation of a wicked success, they had shared among them, not only his gold and his tankards, but the money and plate of all his honest neighbours. Jemmy, still forgetful of "The Spaniards" cried aloud for justice and the gibbet! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... and imploring, as Charles continued: 'Would that more of you would come in this way! They have scored you deep, but know you what is gashed deeper still? Your King's heart! Ah! you will not come, as Coligny does, from his gibbet, with his two bleeding hands. My father was haunted to his dying day by the face of one Huguenot tailor. Why, I see a score, night by night! You are solid; ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gentleman, a knight of Cappadocia, and have left all for to serve the God of heaven. Then the provost enforced himself to draw him unto his faith by fair words, and when he might not bring him thereto he did do raise him on a gibbet; and so must beat him with great staves and broches of iron, that his body was all tobroken in pieces. And after he did do take brands of iron and join them to his sides, and his bowels which then ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... sense enough to fear them," replied Gore vindictively; "not one politician living has the brains or the art to defend his own cause. The ocean of history is foul with the carcases of such statesmen, dead and forgotten except when some historian fishes one of them up to gibbet it." ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... that ghastly gibbet, How dismal 't is to see, The great spectral skeleton— The ladder and the tree. Hark! hark! the clash of arms The bells begin to toll,— He is coming! He is coming! God have mercy on his soul! One last ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... mad?" he said, "or would ye execute an act of justice as if it were a crime and a cruelty? This sacrifice will lose half its savour if we do not offer it at the very horns of the altar. We will have him die where a murderer should die, on the common gibbet—we will have him die where he spilled the blood of so ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... whose head has been savagely exposed to all weathers on the gibbet at Plymouth for the last sixteen years, were alive, something perhaps might be done. His safeguard ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rizpah beneath the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; Saul—great Saul—by the tent-prop with the ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... authority, was rejected. The parties became exasperated, and an attack ensued. The Spanish government basely and wickedly delivered Oge to his enemies. He asked for a defender to plead his cause; but he asked in vain. Thirteen of his companions were condemned to the galleys; more than twenty to the gibbet; and Oge and Chavanne ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... day about a religious reformer who arose in Eastern lands a few years since, and gathered many disciples. He and his principal follower were seized and about to be martyred. They were suspended by cords from a gibbet, to be fired at by a platoon of soldiers. And as they hung there, the disciple turned to his teacher, and as his last word on earth said, 'Master! are you satisfied with me?' His answer was a silent smile; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... guilt, as I have it, detailed by witnesses. When your secret conference with those vile instruments—not yet so vile as yourself—whom it has pleased you to use as tools, were made known before a court and jury, your brazen impudence would depart, and the specter of a gibbet in the distance—and but a short distance, too—would pale your unblushing cheek and palsy your false tongue, skillful as you may have been in casting blame upon others by deceptive and lying words. When it was proved that ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... extinguish the affection, the consideration, the care which, afterward, the world would demand of her, for her child. Almost, not quite, was the budding and essential love looked upon as evil. Although her punishment was neither the gibbet nor the jail of a few hundred years before, yet the ignorance and immobility of the human beings about her made it impossible for them to see anything in her present condition but a vile and premeditated infraction of the social code, the punishment of which was ostracism. All she could do now ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... was carried a silver oar, the emblem from very early days of a pirate execution. Arrived at the gibbet, the prisoner, who always dressed himself in his, or someone else's, best clothes, would doff his hat and ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... Lance. "So many fathoms from a certain tree with arms like a gibbet, on a line with a stone on which is scratched the outline of a skull. Then dig ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... my Lord; the rogues are fat as butter! There is hope of a little rest for the innocents, since business calls me to the Lust in Rust. There should be a law, Lord Governor, to gibbet the black that ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... The shafts and body of my vehicle were two thick ash saplings twelve feet long, joined together with barrel staves two and a half feet long, with the convex sides downward; then fore and aft of the wheels I erected a species of gibbet to prevent my load from shifting, which having done, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... was of little use to be downhearted. The weather continued very severe, and we had again to encounter frost, snow, and intense cold. We prayed for the humane Emperor of France, and wished him elevated on Haman's gibbet. Our journey was most horrible and fatiguing; the roads in some places were literally lost, and we were obliged to drive over ploughed fields in order to avoid the deep ruts. I thought we should have had all our bones dislocated. The five days we were on this wretched road will never ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... way of duel, shall suffer death by hanging; and if he were the challenger, his body, after death, shall be gibbeted.* He who removeth it from the gibbet, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor; and the officer shall ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free. Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee 70 The rude grasp of that great Impulse which ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out. He could not slay ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... no geometrical tracings in the sand. But on a bleak moor in the twilight they saw the black beams of a gibbet, and below the cross-piece, swinging in the wind, they saw a human skeleton with bony ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... upright, planted on both feet, like some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in upon him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a sun-dial, and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had received neither pension nor decoration; he had not known how to make the right use of his ability for ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... from the eye of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs quail, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... the body flickered out, his soul grew serene, and by degrees returned to its heavenly source. He regained the idea of his mission, in his death he saw the salvation of the world; the hideous spectacle spread at his feet melted from his sight, and profoundly united to his Father, he began upon the gibbet the divine life which he was to live in the heart of ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... we were more like a Spillikins Circle than an Army unit, he would, from sheer native kindness of heart, save us the imminent gibbet or the burial by a trench-digging party which awaited us. He would merely illustrate our manifold faults by taking the case of No. 3 in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... vindictively; "not one politician living has the brains or the art to defend his own cause. The ocean of history is foul with the carcases of such statesmen, dead and forgotten except when some historian fishes one of them up to gibbet it." ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... the loud cannon plane Death's lightning-riven lane, Levelling that unskill'd valour, rude, unled: —Yet happier in their fate Than whom the war-fiends wait To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering dead! ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... movable goods on every sale; an absurd tyranny, which would not only have destroyed all arts and commerce, but even have restrained the common intercourse of life. The people refused compliance; the duke had recourse to his usual expedient of the gibbet; and thus matters came still nearer the last, extremities between the Flemings and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... said Richie, "to be round with you, the grace of God is better than gold pieces. When Goblin, as you call yonder Monsieur Lutin,—and you might as well call him Gibbet, since that is what he is like to end in,—shall recommend a page to you, ye will hear little such doctrine as ye have heard from me.—And if they were my last words," he said, raising his voice, "I would say you are misled, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... enemies of the human race. Poisoners, assassins, and incendiaries by profession may be exterminated wherever they are seized; for they attack and injure all nations by trampling under foot the foundations of their common safety. Thus pirates are brought to the gibbet by the first into whose hands they fall. If the sovereign of the country where crimes of that nature have been committed reclaims the authors of them in order to bring them to punishment, they ought to be restored to him, as to one who is principally interested ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... which, as fast as it grew too hot, was cooled with a baboon's blood. To these they poured in the blood of a sow that had eaten her young, and they threw into the flame the grease that had sweaten from a murderer's gibbet. By these charms they bound the infernal ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... seal and the writing were undoubtedly those of Labrosse. Whereupon the chamberlain was arrested, accused of high treason, correspondence with the enemies of France, peculation, everything except the real offence, and finally hung upon the celebrated gibbet of Montfaucon,—the first mention of it in history, though it had been ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... that any true-hearted person will accuse me of a desire to cast reproach upon marriage as an ordinance. Recognizing the beauty and the sanctity of marriage, I have tried to show that true marriage is a higher thing than a ceremony, and that people who use the gibbet and stake for offenders against its forms are too often those who see no offense in the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... said Sir Richard feebly. "God has been good to me beyond my deserts, and this is a crowning mercy. Consider, Justin, it might have been the gibbet and a crowd—instead of this snug bed, and you and Bentley here—just two ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... hundred here and hundreds hang'd in Kent. The tigress had unsheath'd her nails at last, And Renard and the Chancellor sharpen'd them. In every London street a gibbet stood. They are down to-day. Here by this house was one; The traitor husband dangled at the door, And when the traitor wife came out for bread To still the petty treason therewithin, Her cap would ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... weren't more of them watching the condemned man's march to the gibbet: the word that the Secretary had called me in must have gotten all over the Department since ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... cannons, and some guns, could not have escaped from the smallest privateer. In his present situation, he resolved rather to blow up the vessel than to surrender; he concerted measures to achieve this end with a brave Dutchman named Bedaulx, whose sole alternative, if taken, would have been the gibbet. The captain insisted upon stopping at the islands; but government and orders would have been found there, and he followed a direct course, less from choice than from compulsion.[15] At forty leagues from shore, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... me a shudder to name it! We were within the castle, and they set up the gibbet before our eyes. Before the eyes of the son of the one man, the wife and son of the other! I remember catching up Isabel, and running with her into an inner chamber—any whither to be out of sight of that awful ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... brought it. This cart-tilt, draped over with loose sacking, formed a very good imitation of a gipsy tent, that did not in the least detract from the rusticity of the scene, more especially as close behind it was burning a gipsy fire, surmounted by a triple gibbet, on which hung a kettle, melodious even then, and singing through its swan-like neck an intimation of its readiness to aid, at a moment's notice, in the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... had a gibbet for the murderer and a gibbet for the martyr, an execrating hiss for a dastardly act, and as loud a hiss for many a word of generous truthfulness or just insight: a mixed condition of things which is the sign, not of hopeless confusion, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that they were not allowed to read a newspaper or to write a letter; that they were all committed by a magistrate on a charge of high treason, and were never allowed to forget their probable fate on the gibbet; that some of them, as has been said, were deported to distant and unwholesome English possessions. For the truth of these accounts it is not necessary to believe that the English government was intentionally brutal; but it was neglectful ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... wakened suddenly, and told of the discovery of the plot and the arrest of the ringleaders. Pardon was then promised them, and they were dismissed again to their beds, greatly relieved; for they had lived in trepidation, each fearing the other. Duval's body, swinging from a gibbet, gave wholesome warning to those he had seduced; and his head was displayed on a pike, from the highest roof of the buildings, food for birds and a lesson to sedition. His three accomplices were carried by Pontgrave to France, where they made ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up, and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering over a gibbet, "A robe for ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... the main road (at the far end of this semi-private road) turn to the right, and just where the gibbet used to stand, so it is said, in the good old days, there is a sharp left-angled turn which leads to the village of E——. Keep straight on, however, for a mile or two (notice the fine old timbered houses on the right of the footpath opposite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... good citizens of Paris, to whom they were wholly obnoxious, and who occasionally repaid their aggressions with interest. In 1407 two of their number, convicted of assassination and robbery, were condemned to the gibbet, and the sentence was carried into execution; but so great was the uproar occasioned in the university by this violation of its immunities that the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, was compelled to take down their bodies from Montfaucon and see them honorably and ceremoniously ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... those joys the sons of pleasure know Extorted from his fellow creature's woe. Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade, 315 There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign Here, richly deck'd, admits the gorgeous train; 320 Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... common opinion of the virtues of mummy bred great consumption thereof, and princes and great men contended for this strange panacea, wherein Jews dealt largely, manufacturing mummies from dead carcasses and giving them the names of kings, while specifics were compounded from crosses and gibbet leavings. There wanted not a set of Arabians who counterfeited mummies so accurately that it needed great skill to distinguish the false from the true. Queasy stomachs would hardly fancy the doubtful potion, wherein one might so easily swallow ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... by way of duel, shall suffer death by hanging; and if he were the challenger, his body, after death, shall be gibbeted.* He who removeth it from the gibbet, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor; and the officer shall ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... she fell into a troubled sleep, and dreamt that she was being whipped with dry bones suspended on strings, which rattled at every blow like those of a malefactor on a gibbet; that she shifted and shrank and avoided every blow, and they fell then upon the wall to which she was tied. She could not see the face of the executioner for his mask, but ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... should make the least noise, nor even speak loud. Accordingly, on the 30th of April, 1586, the first to enter the barrier was the chief justice and his officers, and the executioner to plant the gibbet, not merely as a matter of ceremony. Fontana went to receive the benediction of the pope, who, after having bestowed it, told him to be cautious of what he did, for a failure would certainly cost him his head. On this occasion, Sixtus felt the difference ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... yet neither the removal, nor even the investigation of this cause, has ever once been seriously attempted. Laws of the most sanguinary and unconstitutional nature have been enacted; the country has been disgraced and exasperated by frequent and bloody executions; and the gibbet, that perpetual resource of weak and cruel legislators, has groaned under the multitude of starving criminals; yet, while the cause is suffered to exist, the effects will ever follow. The amputation of limbs will never eradicate a prurient humour, which must be sought ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... blood, that hath eaten Her nine Farrow: Greaze that's sweaten From the Murderers Gibbet, throw Into ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... herself, 'Why do I weary myself in vain? These two love and know each other and both are friends of my husband. Their desire is an honourable one and meseemeth it is pleasing to God, since the one of them hath scaped the gibbet and the other the lance-thrust and both the wild beasts of the wood; wherefore be it as they will.' Then, turning to the lovers, she said to them, 'If you have it still at heart to be man and wife, it is my pleasure also; be it so, and let the nuptials be celebrated here at ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... and handed over to the Mexican agents. Bound hand and foot, under an escort of thirty men, the next morning we set off to cross the deserts and prairies of Sonora, to gain the Mexican capital, where we well knew that a gibbet ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... have always hitherto furnished the types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged, put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend him. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... their countrymen, by aiding the repeal of the alien and sedition laws. For a score of years, America had invited to its shores every fugitive from British persecution. But the heroes of 'Ninety-eight, who had escaped the gibbet, and successfully made their way to this country through the cordon of English frigates, were welcomed with laws even more offensive than the coercion acts which they had left behind. The last rebellious uprising to ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... bowels of the earth. Away towards the Greyfriars were the tall "lands" which the masons were pulling down. Nearer were men climbing up ladders with hods on their shoulders. Highest of all, against the blue sky, naked as a new gibbet, stood out the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... cruel wrongs, was in the nature of a foul, premeditated murder? "Gentlemen; it is enough for me to look upon the life of this most beautiful and accomplished of her sex, blasted by the heartless villainy of man, without seeing, at the-end of it; the horrible spectacle of a gibbet. Gentlemen, we are all human, we have all sinned, we all have need of mercy. But I do not ask mercy of you who are the guardians of society and of the poor waifs, its sometimes wronged victims; ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... late leader," replied Jorworth, his eyes, while he was speaking, glancing with the vindictive ferocity which dictated his answer. "So many strangers as be here amongst ye, so many bodies to the ravens, so many heads to the gibbet!—It is long since the kites have had such a banquet of lurdane Flemings and ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... homes, lives, and liberty for eighty years. For four-fifths of a century they faced not only the best and bravest soldiers of Europe, but they faced, along with their wives, their children, and their old folk, the flame, the gibbet, the flood, the siege, the pestilence, the famine, "and all men know, or dream, or fear of agony," all for one thing—to teach the oppressor that his cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... immortality? especially when we have so miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable punishment as is the curse and wrath of God; O how ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... cities, where the Huguenots had been too strong to be attacked, and in those castles where the seigneur was of "the religion." The Catholic party thought the destruction complete, the court went in state to return thanks for deliverance from a supposed plot, while Coligny's body was hung on a gibbet. The Pope ordered public thanksgivings, while Queen Elizabeth put on mourning, and the Emperor Maximilian II., alone among Catholic princes, showed any horror or indignation. But the heart of the unhappy ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... capable persons; and to those who can best do the work, all work in this world sooner or later is committed. America was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted at home, they sought a place where they might worship God in their own way, without danger of stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as afterwards the English Puritans, early found their way there. The fate of a party of Coligny's people, who had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these stories, illustrating, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... exaltavi lignum humile; et siccavi lignum viride et frondescere feci lignum aridum." Whether the Rue de l'Arbre Sec in Paris derives its name from the legend I know not. [The name of the street is taken from an old sign-board; some say it is derived from the gibbet placed in the vicinity, but this ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier," Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... allow sin to sneak out of the world. God will not allow it merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... "The gibbet, then, I suppose, must be my doom?" said Lord Menteith. "Yet I wish they had spared me the halter, were it but for the dignity of ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... springing, a shapely tree—symmetric in all its parts—under whose sheltering boughs this nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled from oppression. Thank God, the ax, the gibbet, and the stake have had their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human blood; that vengeance ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... to-night in the deepest dungeon of yon fortification," pointing to the Curfew Tower above them, "there to await the king's judgment; and to-morrow night it will be well for him if he is not swinging from the gibbet near ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of the river they call "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... Dessauer, at sight of so many images of that bird, threw out the observation, loud enough, from the top of the table, 'Hah, Walrave, I see you are making yourself acquainted with the RAVENS in time, that they may not be strange to you at last,'"—when they come to eat you on the gibbet! (not a soft tongue, the Old Dessauer's). "Another day, seeing Walrave seated between two Jesuit Guests, the Prince said: 'Ah, there you are right, Walrave; there you sit safe; the Devil can't get you there!' As the Prince kept continually bantering him in this ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... always seems to do, upon the rise of the old palace and the leap of its tower into the blue air. The history of all Florence is there, with memories of every great time in bronze or marble, but the supreme presence is the martyr who hangs for ever from the gibbet over the quenchless fire in ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Massachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... with even more of his contempt for the bulk of his fellow-men. "No, Mrs. Cranston," said he, "don't wait a day for her. Start just as soon as you are ready, and don't give a thought to this little flibberty gibbet." And so the Cranstons, with Miss Loomis, bade farewell to Scott, and one radiant winter morning drove buoyantly away, almost all of the officers and ladies being out to wave them adieu. Hastings, with a brace of troopers, trotted alongside as they crossed the Platte and reported the camp wagon ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... their right and their left. Both were dressed in black; they appeared pale, but firm. They looked impatiently over the people's heads, standing on tip-toe at every step. D'Artagnan remarked this. "Mordioux!" cried he, "they are in a great hurry to get a sight of the gibbet!" Raoul drew back, without, however, having the power to leave the window. Terror even ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... committed to the Tower. That they were not also hung was, according to the mild and merciful Dr. Reeves, Dean of Westminster, "a main cause of God's punishing the land" in the future time. For those destined to suffer, a gibbet was erected at Charing Cross, that the traitors might in their last moments see the spot where the late king had been executed. Having been half hung, they were taken down, when their heads were severed from their trunks and set up on poles at the ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... at eight o'clock, with their carbines clean, and a round of ball-cartridge each. Keep them sober; and, further, plant two upright posts at the near end of the bridge, with a cross one at top, in the manner of a gibbet. See to these matters, Hewson: I shall be with ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... great gibbet! You always manage me. Well, let us rather go to the 'pater' than to the rabbi; but at least let my ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... several bodies of peasants and utterly defeated them. The prisoners taken were brought before him, and putting off the complete armour which he wore, he heard the confession of his captives, gave them absolution, and then sent them straight to the gibbet. With the return of the peasants to their homes the gentlemen from the country were able to come with their retainers to town, and Richard found himself at the ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... Eccentrick soars to catch the hangman's rope. In order rang'd, with date of place and time, Each owner's name, his parentage and crime, High on his walls, inscribed to glorious shame, Unnumber'd halters gibbet ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... Mrs. Cunningham; I shall certainly spare no efforts in taking him that way, and would far rather he met his fate on a gibbet than by a bullet ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... The gibbet, indeed, certainly disables those who die upon it from infesting the community; but their death seems not to contribute more to the reformation of their associates, than any other method of separation. A thief seldom passes much of his time in recollection or anticipation, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... this shameful circumstance, the editor of the Georgia Chronicle, a professor of religion, said that Dresser "should have been hung up as high as Haman, to rot upon the gibbet until the wind whistled through his bones. The cry of the whole South should be death, instant death, to the Abolitionist, wherever he is caught." What a great and ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... twenty-second of April she was taken out to be sacrificed, attended by the warriors, each of whom carried two pieces of wood which he had received from her hands. Her body having been painted half red and half black, she was attached to a sort of gibbet and roasted for some time over a slow fire, then shot to death with arrows. The chief sacrificer next tore out her heart and devoured it. While her flesh was still warm it was cut in small pieces from the bones, put in little baskets, and taken ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of sword and cunning tongue made himself Duke in my place. Sir Benedict told of a fierce and iron rule, of the pillage and ravishment of town and city, of outrage and injustice, of rack and flame and gibbet—of a people groaning 'neath a thousand cruel wrongs. Then, indeed, did I see that my one great sin a thousand other sins had bred, and was I full of bitter sorrow and anguish. And, in my anguish, I thought ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... Mr. Punch presented the King of Prussia with the "Order of St. Gibbet" for his treatment ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... two brothers, of the name of Darby, were hung in chains near Hales-Owen, since which time there has been only one murder committed in the whole neighbourhood, and that under the very gibbet upon which they hung[5]. ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... more reckless, less prudent, than he of riper years, he had incautiously put himself in the power of Morgan and had been hanged with short shrift. Benjamin, standing upon the outskirts of the crowd jesting and roaring around the foot of the gibbet, with a grief and rage in his heart at his impotency, presently found himself hating his old captain with a fierceness proportioned to his devotion in the past. For he had appealed for mercy personally to Morgan by the memory of his former services and had been ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... rose to the occasion, and directed several of his nobles to forcibly drag the Earl of March from the apartments of the guilty pair, and in 1330 he became the Earl of Double-Quick March—a sort of forced March—towards the gibbet, where he was last seen trying to stand on the English climate. The queen was kept in close confinement during the rest of her life, and the morning papers of that time contained nothing of a ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... nearly dawn when the Liberator left the city. That night the bleaching skeleton of the venerable patriot Hermano was taken down from the gibbet where it had hung so long, by hands that left the revolutionary banner waving proudly in its place. This was an event to startle the viceroy. It was followed by other events. In a few days more and the sounds of insurrection ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... of the English officer vanished, and taking the offered hand of the other, he replied with warmth, "Your generous confidence, Peyton, will not be abused, even though the gibbet on which your Washington hung Andre be ready for my ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... have been by no means teachable birds, for during the years the Spaniards had ruled in Holland, the places of execution were never empty. They were screeching as if in anger, but still remained perched on the tree, which they probably mistook for a gibbet. The rest of the comical ornaments and the thought of the nimble adventurer, who must have climbed up to fasten them, formed a glaring and offensive contrast to the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... no place to him could be So lonely, but that thence might come a pang Brought from without to inward misery. 75 Now, as he plodded on, with sullen clang A sound of chains along the desert rang; He looked, and saw upon a gibbet high A human body that in irons swang, Uplifted by the tempest whirling by; 80 And, hovering, round it often ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... Green's wuddie,'[29] said the caddy on Leith Links; and his employer struck his ball in the direction of the Captain's gibbet on the sands. Mr. Duncan Forbes of Culloden sighed, and, taking off his hat, bowed in the direction of the unhappy ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... Francis Morgan should be hung in chains upon the small island which is situated in the middle of the harbour, and named by the natives Mat-te-wan-ye, a gibbet was accordingly erected, and he was hung there, exhibiting an object of much greater terror to the natives, than to the white people, many of whom were more inclined to make a jest of it; but to ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... traitor to the sovereign from whom he receives his pay, is not likely to be trusted by us. I know your character, that is sufficient. Now, although the government make no difference between one party or the other, with the exception that some may be honoured with the axe instead of the gibbet, you will observe what we do: and as our lives are already forfeited by attainder, we make no scruple of putting out of the way any one whom we may even suspect of betraying us. Nay, more; we can furnish the government with sufficient proofs against ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... political but also in religious matters? And, because she was called queen, can it be considered treason for an Irishman to believe in the spiritual supremacy of the Pope? Yet, unless we look upon as martyrs those who died on the rack and the gibbet in Ireland during her reign, because they refused to admit in a woman the title of Vicar of Christ, to ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... a modern book of travels, relating the particulars of his being cast away, thus concludes: "After having walked eleven hours without having traced the print of human foot, to my great comfort and delight, I saw a man hanging upon a gibbet; my pleasure at the cheering prospect was inexpressible; for it convinced me that I was in ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... wrong, and wished to make restitution; or they had left debts which they were anxious to pay; or they had advice, or warnings, or threats to communicate; or they had been murdered, and were determined to bring their assassins to the gibbet. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... except ceasing to be a ruffian. In doing this, the Salvation Army instinctively grasps the central truth of Christianity and discards its central superstition: that central truth being the vanity of revenge and punishment, and that central superstition the salvation of the world by the gibbet. ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... if time were for him a matter of entire indifference; his horse is loaded with a heavy pack, against which the rider comfortably leans, while he puts a long horn to his lips. He has no sword, or any weapon of defence; but the two grisly figures by the roadside dangling on a gibbet, and his own inimitable expression of contented ease, seem to imply that travelling is secure for him, ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... feat of almost legerdemanic skill, when all that is required is a simple mechanical apparatus and a quick, firm movement of the arm in using it at the right moment. A crane similar in appearance to the oldtime gibbet is erected near the track, and may have served as a warning by its suggestive appearance to some would-be train-wrecker. Its base is a platform two feet and a half square, with two short steps on top to assist the person hanging the pouch; a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... respectable. In 1724 that incomparable young rascal, Jack Sheppard, used to frequent the "Bible" public-house—a printers' house of call—at No. 13. There was a trap in one of the rooms by which Jack could drop into a subterraneous passage leading to Bell Yard. Tyburn gibbet cured Jack of this trick. In 1738 the lane went on even worse, for there Thomas Carr (a low attorney, of Elm Court) and Elizabeth Adams robbed and murdered a gentleman named Quarrington at the "Angel and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... at the Gallery at four o'clock, and it was as yet but half-past two. It was good for him to walk—his liver was a little constricted, and his nerves rather on edge. His wife was always out when she was in Town, and his daughter would flibberty-gibbet all over the place like most young women since the War. Still, he must be thankful that she had been too young to do anything in that War itself. Not, of course, that he had not supported the War from its inception, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... so far from having a turn for sentiment that the gibbet at Dartford, though he had lain down and risen up for weeks under the shadow of the gallows, caused him no qualms as he passed under it; nor the man who hung in chains upon it. But when he rode up to the tavern at the last stage ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... which was unfortunately discovered by John's brother William, who bore him no good will. William told his father, the earl, who immediately ordered Roy to be executed. The poor wretch was accordingly brought out and hanged on the common gibbet of the castle without a moment being allowed him to prepare for his ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... that ill-looking figure that might have fallen from a gibbet. He listening and hiding here. Barnaby first upon the spot last night. Can she, who has always borne so fair a name, be guilty of such crimes in secret?" said the locksmith, musing. "Heaven forgive me if I am wrong, and send ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... and his favourite, ran away to France, and there, with the help of the Count of Hainault and other friends in England, she raised an army and attacked and defeated her husband and his favourite. The young Despenser was hanged on a gibbet fifty feet high, and a Parliament was called to decide what should be ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... thinkest thou I'll endanger my soul gratis? At a word, hang no more about 15 me, I am no gibbet for you. Go. A short knife and a throng!—To your manor of Pickt-hatch! Go. You'll not bear a letter for me, you rogue! you stand upon your honour! Why, thou unconfinable baseness, it is as much as I can do to keep the terms of my honour precise: I, I, I 20 myself ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... decorations were rent from the image and trampled underfoot. Finally the image itself was struck a blow that toppled it over into the dust. The hangman now took it in hand, tied a rope round its neck, and dragged it to a gibbet, on which it was hung. The affair ended in the Cossacks ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... in the morning the pavement was torn up, and a rope fastened round the neck of the corpse, which was then dragged through the streets by the infuriated mob; and the desecrated remains of the recently powerful favourite were hung by the feet to a gibbet, dismembered in the most ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... landing-place, a short distance above the fort or castle. The ground on which it stood was raised by several steps above the road. Within the walls were to be seen (and seen with horror) six crosses for breaking criminals, a large gibbet, a spiked pole for impalements, wheels, etc., etc. together with a slight wooden building, erected for the reception of the ministers of justice upon execution-days. Over the entrance was a figure of justice, with the usual emblems of a sword and balance, ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... of Pizarro and his faithful adherents were left weltering in their blood. Some were for dragging forth the governor's corpse to the market-place, and fixing his head upon a gibbet. But Almagro was secretly prevailed on to grant the entreaties of Pizarro's friends, and allow his interment. This was stealthily and hastily performed, in the fear of momentary interruption. A faithful attendant and his wife, with a few black domestics, wrapped the body ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... take to task, reprove, lecture, bring to book; read a lesson, read a lecture to; rebuke, correct. reprimand, chastise, castigate, lash, blow up, trounce, trim, laver la tete [Fr.], overhaul; give it one, give it one finely; gibbet. accuse &c 938; impeach, denounce; hold up to reprobation, hold up to execration; expose, brand, gibbet, stigmatize; show up, pull up, take up; cry 'shame' upon; be outspoken; raise a hue and cry against. execrate &c 908; exprobate^, speak daggers, vituperate; abuse, abuse like ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... said Duclosse. "He's started the court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago. He'll want a gibbet and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... burning pincers, his bowels to be quartered, his heart to be torn out and thrown into his face, his head to be dissevered from his trunk and placed on a pike, his body to be cut in four pieces, and every piece to be hung on a gibbet over one of the principal ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... my brave fellows," he added, "I may, or I may not, meet you on the deck, where I have so often trod and triumphed. One great account I have to settle with the land before I leave it. I may swing from a gibbet before to-morrow's sun sets; or I may secure—— But if I am not with you," he added, breaking off his sentence abruptly, "before the moon rises, Mathews will take the helm; for I see by his eye that he will not leave the ship he has mated with so much steadiness and good seamanship ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... his eye to the gypsy, whose body he saw, depending from the gibbet, shudder afar under her white robe with the last tremblings of death-agony; then he lowered it to the archdeacon, stretched out at the foot of the tower and no longer having human form; and he said with ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... unholy spot, not a symbol of victory and hope, but of the lowest infamy and degradation, of the vilest death which the vilest men can die. Nor was it the solid, lofty structure, fifteen or twenty feet high, which art has been glorifying for a thousand years, but a rude gibbet of unplaned wood, roughly nailed together, barely eight feet high, and not too heavy for a strong man to carry on his shoulders. Most likely it was such a cross, elevated but little above the heads of the howling mob of Jerusalem, which Paul had in view when he wrote of ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... found that two of our officers, one a general, the other a colonel, with whom I spent the preceding evening, and who went out into the enemy's camp about midnight as spies, were taken, and then were actually going to be executed on a gibbet. I found the distance too great to throw the shell with my hand, but most fortunately recollecting that I had the very sling in my pocket which assisted David in slaying Goliath, I placed the shell in ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... is the best road to show you? Aye, which? Ah! there's the road of the gibbet and the rope. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree!—I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the true principles of honour, he engages in criminal pursuits that injure his country: which at the same time has been to him nothing more than a step-mother. In the paroxysm of his rage, in the exacerbation of his mind, he loses sight of his neighbour's rights, he overlooks the gibbet, he forgets the torture; his unruly desires have become too potent—they have completely absorbed his mind; by a criminal indulgence they have given an inveteracy to his habits which preclude him from changing them; laziness has made him torpid: remorse has gnawed his peace; despair has rendered ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... of high treason." Then the wretched General shivered from head to foot. Every detail of the melodramatic execution seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron. He fancied he could see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray pall. He saw, in the hollow square formed by a battalion of Cossack infantry, the executioner, Froloff, in his red shirt and his plush trousers tucked into his boots, and, beside him, a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... know the awful gibbet's anguish, Not they who, while sad years go by them, in The sunless cells of lonely prisons languish, Do ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... propose, O valiant grave-diggers, to depreciate your merits; such is far from being my intention. I have that in my notes, on the other hand, which will do you more honour than the story of the gibbet and the Frog; I have gleaned, for your benefit, examples of prowess which will shed a new lustre upon ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... thousand florins reward to the man who should bring you the head of Dietisalvi, Nerone Nigi, Angelo Antinori, Niccalo Soderini, and twice the money if they were handed over alive; God will forgive you for dooming to the scaffold or the gibbet the son of Papi Orlandi, Francesco di Brisighella, Bernardo Nardi, Jacopo Frescobaldi, Amoretto Baldovinetti, Pietro Balducci, Bernardo di Banding, Francesco Frescobaldi, and more than three hundred others whose names were none the less dear to Florence because they were less renowned; ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... says—I'll translate it for you: 'In killing Brown the Southern States have committed a crime which will take its place among the calamities of history. The rupture of the Union will fatally follow the assassination of Brown. As to Brown, he was an apostle and a hero. The gibbet has only increased his glory ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... as his Lordship came, she expired in his arms, resigning her precious soul into the hands of Almighty God. The cruel wretch her husband was shot by the pursuers; too good a death for one who deserved the gibbet; and the lady was universally lamented by all tender and religious people. And this tragical relation I have mentioned, upon the account of that impulse, or dream, that the clergyman had at the fatal time ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... fell at his feet, beseeching his royal clemency, when he spurned her from him, saying, 'John James, that rogue, he shall be hanged; yea, he shall be hanged.' And, in the presence of his weeping friends, he ascended from the gibbet to the mansions of the blessed. His real crime was, that he continued to preach after having been warned not to do so by John Robinson, lieutenant of the Tower, properly called, by Mr. Crosby,[233] a devouring wolf, upon whose head the blood of this and other innocent ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "This shall be thy fate!" When he turned round in horror and consternation, the horse, and the rider, and the portmanteau, all were gone; and he found himself within a few paces of the inn door which he had quitted in the morning, with the halter and the brass gibbet still remaining in his hand. The narrative states farther, that this horrible rencontre so affected Conrad Braunsvelt, that he forthwith delivered himself up to the rangers of the forest, and was sent to Cassel to await the pleasure ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... Bellerophon's guns, spy-glass in hand. "By gar, mon Empereur," says Count Bertrand, "dey have erect von prospect for you." The "prospect" is far from encouraging—a fort with the English flag flying from the central tower, and a gibbet erected in front of it. No wonder that the emperor expresses himself dissatisfied with a "prospect" of so lugubrious a character. An English sailor seated on a neighbouring gun, delivers the sentiments ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... riddle for the executioner [4], as I guess it will turn out; they'll be so pinking you with goads, as you carry your gibbet [5] along the streets one day, as soon as ever the old gentleman ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... bottles of wine, and bade him invite the ringleaders on board that night to drink. The ruse worked. The ringleaders were handcuffed, the other colonists awakened in the fort and told that the plot had been crushed. The body of Duval, the chief plotter, in pay of the Basques, swung as warning from a gibbet; and his head was exposed on a pike to the birds of the air. Though Pontgrave left a garrison of twenty-eight when he sailed for France, less than a dozen men had survived the plague of scurvy when the ships came back to Champlain ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... Sir Bartholomew Shower, who in the preceding reign had made himself unenviably conspicuous as a servile and cruel sycophant, who had obtained from James the Recordership of London when Holt honourably resigned it, and who had, as Recorder, sent soldiers to the gibbet for breaches of military discipline. By his servile cruelty he had earned the nickname of the Manhunter. Shower deserved, if any offender deserved, to be excepted from the Act of Indemnity, and left to the utmost rigour of those ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the enterprising editor, and arrange for a meeting, which rendered it necessary to remind him that we were not in the England of fifty years ago, and that duelling was abolished, and that his traducer would not only refuse to fight, but denounce his challenger to the police and gibbet him in his paper. I pointed out, on the other hand, that the article was clearly libellous, and recommended Mr. Fortescue either to obtain a criminal information against the proprietor of the paper, or ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... the confession is maintained in the face of opposition, and that the denial is a cowardly attempt to save one's skin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not come in that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be made brave if it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and the fire, and screw oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than to resist the more specious blandishments of the world, especially when it has been christened, and calls itself religious. The light laugh of scorn, the silent pressure of the low average of Christian character, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... to kill the little fine gentleman, and swing us all on the gibbet, you rascal?" screamed the Gypsy mother, who came up just as Jackanapes and the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... had, of course, been already unravelled by previous historians. Fitzjames was able, however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive guillotine without troubling ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and rafters a' did dirl.— Coffins stood round like open presses, That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And, by some devilish cantrip slight, Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; A knife, a father's ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... dont say so! Young rascal! I want to consult you about him, if you dont mind. Shall we stroll over to the Gibbet? Bentley is too fast for me as a walking companion; but I should like a ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... number, but they were gallant and brave, and yielded only to superior strength. M'Alister More was always attended by four and twenty bowmen, who acted as his body guard, his jury, his judges, and his executioners. They erected on the instant a gibbet before the door of the wretched mother, and there ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... them according to their deserts; but fearing the captain of the pirates should make his escape (as he had formerly done, being their prisoner once before) they judged it safer to leave him guarded on ship-board for the present, while they erected a gibbet to hang him on the next day, without any other process than to lead him from the ship to his punishment; the rumour of which was presently brought to Bartholomew Portugues, whereby he sought all possible means to escape that ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... the vigilance of the farmer's officers, render the yielding to the temptation almost certainly ruinous. The smuggling of salt and tobacco sends every year several hundred people to the galleys, besides a very considerable number whom it sends to the gibbet. Those taxes, levied in this manner, yield a very considerable revenue to government. In 1767, the farm of tobacco was let for twenty-two millions five hundred and forty-one thousand two hundred and seventy-eight ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... absence Osio was condemned to death on the gibbet. His goods were confiscated to the State. His house in Monza was destroyed, and a pillar of infamy recording his crimes, was erected on its site. A proclamation of outlawry was issued on April 5, 1608, under the seal of Don Pietro de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes, and governor of the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Mesurado, which bore S.E. 2 leagues distant. This cape may be easily known, as it rises into a hummock like the head of a porpoise. Also towards the S.E. there are three trees, the eastmost being the highest, the middle one resembling a hay-stack, and that to the southward like a gibbet. Likewise on the main there are four or five high hills, one after the other, like round hummocks. The south-east of the three trees is brandiernaure? and all the coast is a white sand. The said cape stands within a little of six degrees [lat. 6 deg. 20' N. long. 10 deg. 30' W.] The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... Anne did not perceive the meaning of the missive, the ghastly idea never having occurred to her that if Charles had suffered, the gibbet would have been at Portchester. Then, with an electric flash of joy, she saw that it meant relenting on Peregrine's part, deliverance for them both. She put on her clothes with hasty, trembling hands, thankful to Guennik for helping her, pressed a coin into the strong ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... historians. Fitzjames was able, however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... the Hog's Back and the breeze blowing there because on the highest rise we came on a gibbet and rode around it to windward on the broad turfy margin of the road; and also because the sight put my father in mind of a story which he narrated on the way ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... "to be round with you, the grace of God is better than gold pieces. When Goblin, as you call yonder Monsieur Lutin,—and you might as well call him Gibbet, since that is what he is like to end in,—shall recommend a page to you, ye will hear little such doctrine as ye have heard from me.—And if they were my last words," he said, raising his voice, "I would say you are misled, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... have breath, I will continue to combat it, by all my efforts as a writer, by all my words and all my votes as a legislator! I declare it before the crucifix; before that Victim of the penalty of death, who sees and hears us; before that gibbet, in which, two thousand years ago, for the eternal instruction of the generations, the human ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... the 19th century. In England, under the common law, women condemned for high treason or petty treason (murder of husband, murder of master or mistress, certain offences against the coin, &c.) were burned, this being considered more "decent" than hanging and exposure on a gibbet. In practice the convict was strangled before being burnt. The last woman burnt in England suffered in 1789, the punishment being ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... erections on which men are crucified. Stayros the vile engine is called, and it derives its vile name from him. Now, with all these crimes upon him, does he not deserve death, nay, many deaths? For my part I know none bad enough but that supplied by his own shape —that shape which he gave to the gibbet named Stayros after him ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... to save one's skin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not come in that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be made brave if it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and the fire, and screw oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than to resist the more specious blandishments of the world, especially when it has been christened, and calls itself religious. The light laugh of scorn, the silent pressure of the low average ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the freedom of the roads. On all occasions the drovers were armed with various weapons to defend their charge from the cattle-stealers who were too often apt to hang upon their skirts, ready to carry off any stray beast they could find, though the gibbet was the penalty if they were captured. Trains of pack-horses also would bear them company as they approached Cambridge, carrying all kinds of stores and goods for ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... information of the arrival of the armament, and prepared to defend his post, as he rightly guessed that it was destined to act against us. He sent off all his invalids to an Indian village at some distance, and exhorting his soldiers to stand by him, he erected a gibbet, and placed a guard on the road to Chempoalla. On the arrival of the deputation from Narvaez at Villa Rica, they were astonished to meet none but Indians, as Sandoval had ordered all the soldiers to remain in their quarters, and remained ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... None, I believe, ever thought that before. But the same wood, I suppose, that makes the gibbet could make the mast of a man-of-war. I tell you, however, why you have taken this fancy to me,—the strong sympathize with the strong. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... up uneasy and imploring, as Charles continued: 'Would that more of you would come in this way! They have scored you deep, but know you what is gashed deeper still? Your King's heart! Ah! you will not come, as Coligny does, from his gibbet, with his two bleeding hands. My father was haunted to his dying day by the face of one Huguenot tailor. Why, I see a score, night by night! You are solid; ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... terms. At last Isabella, disgusted with her husband and his favourite, ran away to France, and there, with the help of the Count of Hainault and other friends in England, she raised an army and attacked and defeated her husband and his favourite. The young Despenser was hanged on a gibbet fifty feet high, and a Parliament was called to decide what should be done with ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... excuse or grounds for a predisposition to anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to close the eyes to the entire problem of the future, and we may be sure that what omits the future is no adequate nor stable ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... to Lady Roseville's door; the first person I saw in the drawing-room, was Ellen. She lifted up her eyes with that familiar sweetness with which they had long since began to welcome me. "Her brother may perish on the gibbet!" was the thought that curdled my blood, and I ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... escaped from the smallest privateer. In his present situation, he resolved rather to blow up the vessel than to surrender; he concerted measures to achieve this end with a brave Dutchman named Bedaulx, whose sole alternative, if taken, would have been the gibbet. The captain insisted upon stopping at the islands; but government and orders would have been found there, and he followed a direct course, less from choice than from compulsion.[15] At forty leagues from shore, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... valuable security for this trifling debt than you would dare to ask; the bureau is full of pearls —metrical, but beyond price. I beg your tenderest care of them, especially my tragedy in seven acts. Do not play jinks with the contents of that bureau, or Posterity will gibbet you and the name of 'Gouge' will one day be execrated throughout ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... vessels entered the river, Bobadilla beheld on either bank a gibbet with the body of a Spaniard hanging on it, apparently but lately executed. He considered these as conclusive proofs of the alleged cruelty of Columbus. Many boats came off to the ship, every one being anxious to pay early court to this public censor. Bobadilla remained on board all ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... make haste away, as you are in danger of the gibbet. The duel was fought in the ban, and I am a high court officer, and a Knight of the White Eagle. So lose no time, and if you have not enough money ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... shape of a prison,—this delectable institution being the work and discovery of civilization. Our Irishman might indeed, without a bull, with his back to The Desert, and his face to the civilized communities of the Coast, exclaim, on sight of the first prison and gibbet, "Thank God, I am out of the land of Barbarians, and have reached the land of Civilization!" Of fines, I heard of no other case than that of the Sultan fining two strangers a couple of dollars, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... which formerly occupied the site of William's building which we are now examining, that Becket was hastily buried after his assassination, when his murderers were still threatening to come and drag his body out, "hang it on a gibbet, tear it with horses, cut it into pieces, or throw it in some pond to be devoured by swine or birds of prey." And from that time until the translation of the relics in 1220, this was the most sacred spot in the cathedral, and it was known, down to Reformation times, as "Becket's tomb." ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... in the manner of the English officer vanished, and taking the offered hand of the other, he replied with warmth, "Your generous confidence, Peyton, will not be abused, even though the gibbet on which your Washington hung Andre be ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... chains. This was no part of the sentence, but was performed in accordance with a special order or direction of the court, given, probably, in most cases, verbally to the sheriff. After execution, the body of the felon was taken from the gallows and hung upon a gibbet conveniently near the place where the fact was committed, there to remain, until, from the action of the elements, or the ravages of birds of prey, it disappeared. Of the object of this ghastly feature of capital punishment ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... your father meant to carry the civilization of Massachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than one thousand dollars were prohibited by law from wearing the garb of a gentleman, ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... generals were obliged to give an account of their conduct; and they all were made responsible for the events of the war. Ill success was punished there as a crime against the state; and whenever a general lost a battle, he was almost sure, at his return, of ending his life upon a gibbet. Such was the furious, cruel, and barbarous disposition of the Carthaginians, who were always ready to shed the blood of their citizens as well as of foreigners. The unheard-of tortures which they made Regulus suffer, are a manifest proof of this assertion; and their history will furnish us with ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... innocent, indeed? his wicked, wicked courses—(an old man, too—gray-headed, with no young blood in him to excuse, no inexperience to extenuate), these deserved—did he say hanging? it was a harsher syllable—hell: and the contrite sinner gladly would have welcomed all the terrors of the gibbet, in hope to take full vengeance on himself for his wicked thirst for gold and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... figure that might have fallen from a gibbet. He listening and hiding here. Barnaby first upon the spot last night. Can she, who has always borne so fair a name, be guilty of such crimes in secret?" said the locksmith, musing. "Heaven forgive me if I am wrong, and send me ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... bore witness. We should have preferred accommodations in any of the ivy-grown, steep-roofed cots about us, or in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken, and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... personal interest. The more perplexed the, state of public and private affairs, the better for them. Therefore, in revolutions, as a body, they remain neuter, unless it is made for their benefit to act. Individually, they are a set of necessary evils; and, for the sake of the bar, the bench, and the gibbet, require to be humoured. But any legislator who attempts to render laws clear, concise, and explanatory, and to divest them of the quibbles whereby these expounders—or confounders—of codes fatten on the credulity of States and the miseries of unfortunate millions, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... this gallant young man! Should you succeed, you must meet him there. Could you, in the presence of Almighty God—He who knows the inmost thoughts—justify your work of to-day? His mandate is not to the gibbet. Eternal Justice dictates there, whose decrees are eternal. Do you think of this? Do you defy it? If not—if you invoke it, do it through your acts toward your fellow-man. Have you to-day done unto this man as you would he should do unto you? I pause for a reply—none. Then shudder and repent, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... incarnation of the people, and of modern democracy itself. The great work of emancipation had to be sealed, therefore, with the blood of the just, even as it was inaugurated with the blood of the just. The tragic history of the abolition of slavery, which opened with the gibbet of John Brown, will close with ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... of Londonderry. This expedient, far from answering the purpose of Rosene, produced quite a contrary effect. The besieged were so exasperated at this act of inhumanity, that they resolved to perish rather than submit to such a barbarian. They erected a gibbet in sight of the enemy, and sent a message to the French general, importing that they would hang all the prisoners they had taken during the siege, unless the protestants whom they had driven under the walls should be immediately ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... savage, must be familiar with arms. He must be accustomed to danger, be cool-blooded, alive to the sentiment of honor, and above all, sensitive to that stern military code which, to the imagination of the soldier, ever holds out to him the provost's gibbet to which he is sure to rise, should he strike one blow too many. Should all these restraints, inward as well as outward, be wanting, the man plunges into insurrection. He is a novice in the acts of violence, which he ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... financial distress of their countrymen, by aiding the repeal of the alien and sedition laws. For a score of years, America had invited to its shores every fugitive from British persecution. But the heroes of 'Ninety-eight, who had escaped the gibbet, and successfully made their way to this country through the cordon of English frigates, were welcomed with laws even more offensive than the coercion acts which they had left behind. The last rebellious uprising to occur in Ireland under the Georges, had sent Thomas Addis ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... virtue, being moved against a soldier of his, for that returning alone from forage he could give him no account where he had left a companion of his, took it for granted that he had killed him, and presently condemned him to death. He was no sooner mounted upon the gibbet, but, behold, his wandering companion arrives, at which all the army were exceedingly glad, and after many embraces of the two comrades, the hangman carried both the one and the other into Piso's presence, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... England is undermining Al-Islam," cried a voice in India. "A base one in the service of some European coalition, who, under the pretext of preaching the spiritualities, is undoing the work of the Revolution. The gibbet is for ordinary traitors; for him ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... men is created. It rises gradually, like one of those mysterious mounds in barbarous countries, to which a stone is added by every passerby; each one brings something at random, and adds it as he passes, without being able himself to see whether he is raising a pedestal or a gibbet. Who will dare look behind him, to see his rash judgments held up ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... God! that ghastly gibbet! How dismal 'tis to see The great tall spectral skeleton, The ladder and the tree! Hark! hark! it is the clash of arms,— The bells begin to toll,— "He is coming! he is coming! God's mercy on his soul!" One last ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... mules and a voiturier named Joseph. Joseph, though he turned out to be an ex-criminal, proved himself the one Frenchman upon whose fidelity and good service Smollett could look back with unfeigned satisfaction. The sight of a skeleton dangling from a gibbet near Valence surprised from this droll knave an ejaculation and a story, from which it appeared only too evident that he had been first the comrade and then the executioner of one of the most notorious brigands of the century. The story as told by Smollett does not wholly ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... least visited. Walls of sharp rock rise up over eight hundred feet high round some of its sunken lakes—one is called the Powder Lake—and the level above this abyss stretches out in moors and desolate downs, peopled with herds of lean sheep, and marked here and there by sepulchral, gibbet-looking signposts, shaped like a rough [Symbol: T] and set in a heap of loose stones. It is a great contrast to turn aside from this landscape and look on the smiling villages and pretty wooded scenery of the valley of the Mosel proper; the long lines of handsome, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... uniform. For the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be whipped, branded, or hanged. There was a hangman over at Melun, and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... butcher—named London swore by God that if he should be arrested and cast into the jail, he would hang or burn all the Negroes in New York, guilty or not guilty. On this same day five Negroes were hanged. One of them was "hung in chains" upon the same gibbet with Hughson. And the Christian historian says "the town was amused" on account of a report that Hughson had turned black and the Negro white! The vulgar and sickening description of the condition of the bodies, in which Mr. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... France, eluding Roberval a year late, and carrying but a few worthless quartz diamonds and a little sham gold. Then Roberval, the Lord of Norembega, reigns alone in his vast and many-titled domain, for another season of snows and famine, freely using the lash and gibbet to keep his penal colonists in subjection; and then, according to some authorities, supported by the absence of Carder's name from the local records of St. Malo for a few months, Cartier was sent out to bring the Lord of ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... that form in order to feed upon the loathsome emanations of peculiarly horrible places, such as would be the site of a gallows. An instance of this kind is furnished by the celebrated "Gyb Ghosts," or ghosts of the gibbet, described in More Glimpses of the World Unseen, p. 109, as being repeatedly seen in the form of herds of mis-shapen swine-like creatures, rushing, rooting and fighting night after night on the site of that foul monument of ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... as he promised, but though his money was taken there was no good result. At length the day arrived when the executions were to take place. A stage was erected with a gibbet on it and huge casks of water. Below, on the solid ground, stakes with chains were driven into the ground; while near the gibbet was a post with a chain in which those who were to be mercifully strangled before being ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... to deter the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after the Austrians came into the city and a man was hanged the first morning, in spite of the fact that the Austrians had promised safety to the non-combatants. Dr. Edward Ryan, the head of the American Red Cross in Belgrade, protested, and the gibbet was taken down. But my sister says that eighteen more people were hanged in the fortress down by the Save—she hears—where ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... unfortunately discovered by John's brother William, who bore him no good will. William told his father, the earl, who immediately ordered Roy to be executed. The poor wretch was accordingly brought out and hanged on the common gibbet of the castle without a moment being allowed him to ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... murder by way of duel, shall suffer death by hanging; and if he were the challenger, his body, after death, shall be gibbeted.* He who removeth it from the gibbet, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor; and the officer shall see that ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... went heavily up the grandiose stairway as if a gibbet waited at the top. They went into Sir Joseph's room, which adjoined that of his wife. Mr. Verrinder paused on the sill ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... said Jackson of Georgia, "and see the progress we are making toward venality and corruption. We already hear the sounding title of Highness and Most Honorable trumpeted in our ears, which, ten years since, would have exalted a man to a station as high as Haman's gibbet." Page of Virginia was ablaze with indignation. "Good God!" he exclaimed. "What, authorize in a free republic, by law, too, by your first act, the exertion of a dangerous royal prerogative in your Chief Magistrate!" Gerry, in remarks whose oblique criticism upon ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... famous enemy of State and Church and of innumerable notorious and obscure criminals, including the infamous Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was burned alive, and Cartouche, broken on the wheel. A permanent gibbet stood there and a market cross, and there during the English wars the infuriated Parisians tied the hands and feet of hundreds of English prisoners taken at Pontoise and flung them into the Seine. Every St. John's eve—the church and cloister of St. Jean ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... before a cultured audience, but the crowds who came to an Elizabethan play were of a temper to enjoy a Mohawk scalp dance. They were accustomed to violent scenes and sensations; they had witnessed the rack and gibbet in constant operation; they were familiar with the sight of human heads decorating the posts of London Bridge or carried about on the pikes of soldiers. After witnessing such horrors free of cost, they would follow their queen and pay their money to see a ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... town, De Soto passed a high gibbet upon which three malefactors were hung in chains, swaying in the breeze. That revolting spectacle revealed the sad truth that in Peru, as well as elsewhere, man's fallen nature developed itself in crime and woe. The Emperor had also a large standing army, and the ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... Final True Thing I am purposed to say about Christmas. Don't ask me yet what that Thing is. Truth dwells in no man, but is a shy beast you must hunt as you may in the forests that are round about the Walls of Heaven. And I do hereby curse, gibbet, and denounce in execrationem perpetuam atque aeternam the man who hunts in a crafty or calculating way—as, lying low, nosing for scents, squinting for trails, crawling noiselessly till he shall come near to his quarry and ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... few of his friends, did so," replied the young stranger with a smile, "and we admire them very much for so doing, but I am afraid we should hang them, nevertheless, if they were in a position to try the thing over again. The illustration of the gibbet and the statue might have more applications than one, for I sincerely believe, if we could revive historical characters, we should almost in all cases erect a gallows for those to whom ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... understand. Some thought him a negro just from Guinea, who had either fallen overboard, or escaped from a slave-ship. Nothing, however, could ever draw from him any account of his origin. When questioned on the subject, he merely pointed to Gibbet-Island, a small rocky islet, which lies in the open bay, just opposite to Communipaw, as if that were his native place, though every body knew it had never ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... resemblance. Madame Sand's taste and higher art-instincts would have revolted against the practice—now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers—of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations to each other, which, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban: the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn: the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rispah beneath the gibbet: Sisera bowing in weariness: Saul—great Saul—by the tent-prop with the jewels ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... old Zibet, Toboggans he tried to prohibit. If any one tried To take a sly slide, He ordered him hanged on a gibbet. ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... over the coals, rake over the coals, call to order; take to task, reprove, lecture, bring to book; read a lesson, read a lecture to; rebuke, correct. reprimand, chastise, castigate, lash, blow up, trounce, trim, laver la tete[Fr], overhaul; give it one, give it one finely; gibbet. accuse &c. 938; impeach, denounce; hold up to reprobation, hold up to execration; expose, brand, gibbet, stigmatize; show up, pull up, take up; cry "shame" upon; be outspoken; raise a hue and cry against. execrate &c. 908; exprobate[obs3], speak daggers, vituperate; abuse, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... cover is a full-length figure of Hope, with dark hair, dressed in a red dress with large falling collar, having a blue flower at the point. In her left hand she holds an anchor. In the distant background is a cottage and a gibbet on a hill, the sun with rays just appearing under a cloud. On the hilly foreground is a red lily, and further afield a caterpillar and a strawberry plant. On the lower cover is a full-length figure ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... taken!" And so running disorderly and fast we made for the Port, while English men-at-arms might be plainly seen and heard, gazing, waving their hands, and shouting from the battlements of the two gate-towers. Down the road we ran, past certain small houses of peasants, and past a gibbet with a marauder hanging from it, just over ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... however improbable it might be, to substantiate the offence, I should hardly have regarded the Judge with less reverence because he pronounced sentence of death upon the unhappy victims of superstition, and sent them to the stake, or the gibbet. But they resolutely persisted in asserting their innocence, and there was not only no evidence against them which ought to have weighed in the mind of any reasonable man who believed in witchcraft, but during the ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... he will suffer the penalty for his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Fire, and the rest to be pierced with Lances, and run through with the point of the Sword, by a multitude of Men: And Anacaona her self who (as we said before,) sway'd the Imperial Scepter, to her greater honor was hanged on a Gibbet. And if it fell out that any person instigated by Compassion or Covetousness, did entertain any Indian Boys and mount them on Horses, to prevent their Murder, another was appointed to follow them, who ran them through the back or in the hinder parts, and if they chanced to escape Death, and fall ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... alcayd[^e] of theft. As the property was found in his possession, the alcayd[^e] ordered him to be hung. His parents went on their way to Compostella, and returned after eight days, but what was their amazement to find their son alive on the gibbet, and uninjured. They went instantly to tell the alcayd[^e]; but the magistrate replied, "Woman, you are mad! I would just as soon believe these pullets, which I am about to eat, are alive, as that a man who has been gibbeted ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... is hard, as give, except in giant, gigantick, gibbet, gibe, giblets, Giles, gill, gilliflower, gin, ginger, gingle, to which may be added Egypt ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... blazing temper," remarked Hamilton. "Lee and Ramsay and Stewart were like to have died of fright. I wish to God he'd strung the first to a gibbet!" ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... pleasure know Extorted from his fellow creature's woe. Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade, 315 There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign Here, richly deck'd, admits the gorgeous train; 320 Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy! Sure ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... this and that it was agreeable to the girl also, she said in herself, 'Why do I weary myself in vain? These two love and know each other and both are friends of my husband. Their desire is an honourable one and meseemeth it is pleasing to God, since the one of them hath scaped the gibbet and the other the lance-thrust and both the wild beasts of the wood; wherefore be it as they will.' Then, turning to the lovers, she said to them, 'If you have it still at heart to be man and wife, it is my pleasure also; be ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... comparative harmlessness, and from its being not so much a madness as a folly of the people. Unlike other notions that sprang from the belief in witchcraft, and which we have already dwelt upon at sufficient length, it has sent no wretches to the stake or the gibbet, and but a ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... evening, I had the honour of receiving, at Haworth Parsonage, a distinguished guest, none other than W. M. Thackeray, Esq. Mindful of the rites of hospitality, I hung him up in state this morning. He looks superb in his beautiful, tasteful gilded gibbet. For companion he has the Duke of Wellington, (do you remember giving me that picture?) and for contrast and foil Richmond's portrait of an unworthy individual, who, in such society, must be name-less. Thackeray looks away from the latter character with a grand scorn, edifying ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... was knotted, which made it the easier to descend; but so furious was Dick's hurry, and so small his experience of such gymnastics, that he span round and round in mid-air like a criminal upon a gibbet, and now beat his head, and now bruised his hands, against the rugged stonework of the wall. The air roared in his ears; he saw the stars overhead, and the reflected stars below him in the moat, whirling like dead leaves before the tempest. And then he lost hold and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is drawn up and discovers a gibbet and Pulcinello standing on a ladder affixed to it with a rope round his neck. The showman with the utmost gravity and assumed melancholy informs the audience that a most serious calamity is about to happen to Naples: that Signor Pulcinello is condemned to be ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... distance above the fort or castle. The ground on which it stood was raised by several steps above the road. Within the walls were to be seen (and seen with horror) six crosses for breaking criminals, a large gibbet, a spiked pole for impalements, wheels, etc., etc. together with a slight wooden building, erected for the reception of the ministers of justice upon execution-days. Over the entrance was a figure of justice, with the usual emblems of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the pilot "There is reason in his doubts, and they shall be appeased. I like the proud and fearless eye of the young man, and while he dreads a gibbet from my hands, I will show him how to repose a noble confidence. Read this, sir, and tell me ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection against the laws of the United States; to interpose the arm of state sovereignty between rebellion and the halter, and to rescue the traitor from the gibbet. Although conducted under the auspices of state sovereignty, it would not the less be levying war against the Union; but, as a state cannot be punished for treason, nullification cases herself in the complete ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... lie in new-made graves, bloody corpses of young men, The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud, And all these things bear fruits, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... of the worth and right of the individual man. Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster Hall—"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia, and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;" or when at Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be hanged in order to test it; or in his review of parade fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... chimes of the bell drew one towards them. . . . I was already beginning to lose patience and grow anxious, but behold at last, staring into the dark distance, I saw the outline of something very much like a gibbet. It was the long-expected ferry. It moved towards us with such deliberation that if it had not been that its lines grew gradually more definite, one might have supposed that it was standing still or ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would not be ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... by a chain fastened to his leg, leaps on the breech of one of the Bellerophon's guns, spy-glass in hand. "By gar, mon Empereur," says Count Bertrand, "dey have erect von prospect for you." The "prospect" is far from encouraging—a fort with the English flag flying from the central tower, and a gibbet erected in front of it. No wonder that the emperor expresses himself dissatisfied with a "prospect" of so lugubrious a character. An English sailor seated on a neighbouring gun, delivers the sentiments of the day after the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... from our best plays. We are resolved to convert the great hall into a theatre, and get up the Beaux Stratagem without delay — I think I shall make no contemptible figure in the character of Scrub; and Lismahago will be very great in Captain Gibbet. Wilson undertakes to entertain the country people with Harlequin Skeleton, for which he has got a jacket ready ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... in single combat; and after he was overcome, the king gave orders to put out his eyes, and afterwards to emasculate him; and his steward, William by name, who was the son of his stepmother, the king commanded to be hanged on a gibbet. Then was also Eoda, Earl of Champagne, the king's son-in-law, and many others, deprived of their lands; whilst some were led to London, and there killed. This year also, at Easter, there was a very great stir through all this nation and many others, on account of Urban, who was declared Pope, ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... murmur, and at nightfall left the cottage in Danny's company. Two hours afterwards Hardress himself arrived in a fit of compunction. On learning that they had departed, he swore to himself that if this his servant exceeded his views, he would tear his flesh from his bones, and gibbet him as a miscreant and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... necessary to remind him that we were not in the England of fifty years ago, and that duelling was abolished, and that his traducer would not only refuse to fight, but denounce his challenger to the police and gibbet him in his paper. I pointed out, on the other hand, that the article was clearly libellous, and recommended Mr. Fortescue either to obtain a criminal information against the proprietor of the paper, or sue him ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... Junta, when he attempted to maintain order amongst the insurgents he was killed in the street. Valladolid obliged the Captain- General, Don Gregorio de la Cuesta, to take a part in the rising of the populace. At the first sign of resistance shown by the old soldier, they erected a gibbet under his windows. Burgos, occupied by Marshal Bessieres, remained quiet, but Barcelona attempted an insurrection. The Catalans were armed to the teeth, and, on General Duhesme threatening to set fire to the town, the more violent of them escaped to places which were less threatened. ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered,—like an unhooped cask upon a pole,—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... when the Liberator left the city. That night the bleaching skeleton of the venerable patriot Hermano was taken down from the gibbet where it had hung so long, by hands that left the revolutionary banner waving proudly in its place. This was an event to startle the viceroy. It was followed by other events. In a few days more and the sounds of insurrection were heard throughout ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... shocks and disgusts. He seems to say, "I am a villain. I know that I am so, and I am proud of being so. To obtain the rank I possess I have respected no human laws, and I bid defiance to all Divine vengeance. I might be murdered or hanged, but it is impossible to degrade me. On a gibbet or in the palace of a Prince, seized by the executioner or dining with Sovereigns, I am, I will, and I must, always remain the same. Infamy cannot debase me, nor is it in the power of grandeur to exalt me." General, Ambassador, Field-marshal, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... me see, what is the best road to show you? Aye, which? Ah! there's the road of the gibbet and the rope. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... into the hands of his enemies. This venerable noble, who had nearly reached his ninetieth year, was instantly, without trial, or witness, or accusation, or answer, condemned to death by the rebellious barons; he was hanged on a gibbet; his body was cut to pieces and thrown to the dogs; and his head was sent to Winchester, the place whence he derived his title, and was there set on a pole, and exposed to the insults ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... where the case proveth capital. And yet the late severity in France was more, where by a kind of martial law, established by ordinance of the King and Parliament, the party that had slain another was presently had to the gibbet, insomuch as gentlemen of great quality were hanged, their wounds bleeding, lest a natural death should prevent the example of justice. But, my lords, the course which we shall take is of far greater lenity, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... all we do, Will haunt us fools, and other vices too, Why should not reason use her own just sense, And square her punishments to each offence? Suppose a slave, as he removes the dish, Licks the warm gravy or remains of fish, Should his vexed master gibbet the poor lad, He'd be a second Labeo, STARING mad. Now take another instance, and remark A case of madness, grosser and more stark. A friend has crossed you:—'tis a slight affair; Not to forgive it writes you down ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... oh, shame to say! They were seized from behind, their arms bound behind their backs, and, in spite of their protests, led out on the watch tower, where was a permanent gibbet, and, in sight of all their comrades, ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rizpah beneath the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; Saul—great Saul—by the tent-prop with the jewels in ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,' and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim and the achievement of many recent authors of distinction. ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... of St. Mary le Bow, where he defended himself by force of arms. He was at last forced from his retreat, condemned, and executed, amidst the regrets of the populace, who were so devoted to his memory, that they stole his gibbet, paid the same veneration to it as to the cross, and were equally zealous in propagating and attesting reports of the miracles wrought by it [p]. But though the sectaries of this superstition were punished by the justiciary [q], it received ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... ready lash to the backs of the hardened criminals aloft; and thus, the hour's exhibition ended, and the "king's justice" satisfied, away would the criminals be led, some on a hurdle to Montfaucon, and there hung on its ample gibbet, amid the rattling bones of other wretches; some would be hurried back to the Chastelet, or other prisons; and others would be sent off to work, chained to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... the investigation of this cause, has ever once been seriously attempted. Laws of the most sanguinary and unconstitutional nature have been enacted; the country has been disgraced and exasperated by frequent and bloody executions; and the gibbet, that perpetual resource of weak and cruel legislators, has groaned under the multitude of starving criminals; yet, while the cause is suffered to exist, the effects will ever follow. The amputation of limbs will never eradicate ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... and violent will surely be allowed the most justifiable, as the most effectual. Imprisonments, fines, confiscations, whippings, serve only to irritate the sects, without disabling them from resistance: but the stake, the wheel, and the gibbet, must soon terminate in the extirpation or banishment of all the heretics inclined to give disturbance, and in the entire silence ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... authority to declare herself paramount not only in political but also in religious matters? And, because she was called queen, can it be considered treason for an Irishman to believe in the spiritual supremacy of the Pope? Yet, unless we look upon as martyrs those who died on the rack and the gibbet in Ireland during her reign, because they refused to admit in a woman the title of Vicar of Christ, to such decision ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... is the remedy? To take that tailor by the throat, and gibbet him in The New York Tribune? Not at all; it does the women no good, and he does not deserve it. I will tell you what is to be done. Behind the door at which those women stand asking for work, on one side stands an orthodox ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... could express, and she believed also that the joy which she took in it was but the prelude to a much greater glory, for her god so held her heart that no other desire could enter in. Thus the witches often went to the gibbet and the stake, glorifying their god and committing their souls into his keeping, with a firm belief that death was but the entrance to an eternal life in which they would never be parted from him. Fanatics and visionaries as many of them were, they ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... Andrew, as I writ, was the Mortimer hanged, without defence by him made (he had allowed none to Sir Hugh Le Despenser and my Lord of Kent): and four days hung his body in irons on the gibbet, as Sir Hugh's the father had done. Verily, as he had done, so did God apay him, which is just Judge over ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... Florence where in happier days he had held the multitude spell-bound by his burning eloquence. There sentence was passed upon him. Stripped of his black Dominican robe and long white tunic, he was bound to a gibbet, strangled by a halter, and his dead body consumed by fire, his ashes being thrown into the river Arno. Such was the miserable end of the great Florentine preacher, whose strange and complex character has been so often discussed, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Bohemians. For Ferdinand, not content to scotch the snake, never rested till it had ceased to be. The Carolinum, with all its endowments, privileges, and libraries, was handed over to its rival. Protestantism was declared to be extinct; and the gibbet, and the stake, and confiscations, and banishments, rendered the decree, in due time, more than an idle boast. There is, probably, no instance on record of an extirpation of a religious creed more absolute than that which the Jesuits effected of Protestantism in Bohemia. ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... what of the night? - Cannon and scaffold and sword, Horror of gibbet and cord, Mowed us as sheaves for the grave, Mowed us down for the right. We do not grudge or repent. Freely to freedom we gave Pledges, till life ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... health of his Most Sacred Majesty, and the damnation of Red-nosed Noll. That tenderness to the fallen which has, through many generation% been a marked feature of the national character, was for a time hardly discernible. All London crowded to shout and laugh round the gibbet where hung the rotten remains of a prince who had made England the dread of the world, who had been the chief founder of her maritime greatness, and of her colonial empire, who had conquered Scotland and Ireland, who had humbled Holland and Spain, the terror of whose name ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... road to Fenworth branches off, and the handpost stands. A gibbet once stood there not onconnected with our ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... true-hearted person will accuse me of a desire to cast reproach upon marriage as an ordinance. Recognizing the beauty and the sanctity of marriage, I have tried to show that true marriage is a higher thing than a ceremony, and that people who use the gibbet and stake for offenders against its forms are too often those who see no offense in the ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... personages, there are not a few humbler individuals whose history is faithfully told (if you choose to credit it) by the painted inscriptions below. There is even a convict, who, at the moment of being hanged, implored succour of the all-powerful Madonna, whereupon the beam of the gibbet instantly broke, and the worthy individual was restored to society—a very doubtful benefit after all. On Colonel Bariola and the Duke of Sant' Arpino arriving at this place, which is only five miles distant from Mantua, their carriage was naturally stopped by the commissaire of the Austrian ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had hanged was born at the same time as Sixtus V., who from a pig-herd became Pope, the astrologers would say one had made a mistake of a few seconds, and that it is impossible, according to the rules, for the same star to give the triple crown and the gibbet. It is then only because a host of experiences belied the predictions, that men perceived at last that the art was illusory; but before being undeceived, they ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... burned; but thieves are hanged (as I said before) generally on the gibbet or gallows, saving in Halifax, where they are beheaded after a strange manner, and whereof I find this report. There is and has been of ancient time a law, or rather a custom, at Halifax, that whosoever does commit any felony, and ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... earth hear one cry sent Even from the hideous gibbet height, 'Praise to the Lord Omnipotent, The vultures have a ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... smiling; "but I hate the judgment that, like the flesh-fly, skims over whatever is sound, to detect and settle upon some spot which is tainted. But to the purpose. If I conduct thee or send thee a prisoner to St. Mary's, thou art to-night a tenant of the dungeon, to-morrow a burden to the gibbet-tree. If I were to let thee go hence at large, I were thereby wronging the Holy Church, and breaking mine own solemn vow. Other resolutions may be adopted in the capital, or better times may speedily ensue. Wilt thou remain a true prisoner upon thy parole, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... mutinied against him, and he was delivered into the hands of his enemies. This venerable noble, who had nearly reached his ninetieth year, was instantly without trial, or witness, or accusation, or answer, condemned to death by the rebellious barons: he was hanged on a gibbet; his body was cut in pieces, and thrown to the dogs;[****] and his head was sent to Winchester, the place whose title he bore, and was there set on a pole and exposed to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... saved by the Greeks, and restored, after the decease of his brother Mahomet, to liberty and empire. A degenerate mind seemed to argue his spurious birth; and if, on the throne of Adrianople, he was adored as the Ottoman sultan, his flight, his fetters, and an ignominious gibbet, delivered the impostor to popular contempt. A similar character and claim was asserted by several rival pretenders: thirty persons are said to have suffered under the name of Mustapha; and these frequent executions may perhaps insinuate, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Mr. James; he is a sweet gentleman.' Again, on the following morning, she fell at his feet, beseeching his royal clemency, when he spurned her from him, saying, 'John James, that rogue, he shall be hanged; yea, he shall be hanged.' And, in the presence of his weeping friends, he ascended from the gibbet to the mansions of the blessed. His real crime was, that he continued to preach after having been warned not to do so by John Robinson, lieutenant of the Tower, properly called, by Mr. Crosby,[233] a devouring wolf, upon whose head the blood ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of cloth; thou shalt cut me a coat to cover the bare back, thou whose trade it is. 'Impossible?' Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate there, half unveiling herself in the gloom of the future, with her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips, and very authentic Tailor's Hell; waiting to see whether it is 'possible'? Out with thy scissors, and cut that cloth or thy ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... magistrates at the old Public Office in Dale End; committed; and in due course tried and sentenced at Warwick to be hanged and gibbeted on Washwood Heath, near the scene of the murder. The sentence was carried out April 2, 1781, the bodies hanging on the gibbet in chains a short time, until they were surreptitiously removed by some humanitarian friends who did not approve of the exhibition. What became of the bodies was not known until the morning of Thursday, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... enough to fear them," replied Gore vindictively; "not one politician living has the brains or the art to defend his own cause. The ocean of history is foul with the carcases of such statesmen, dead and forgotten except when some historian fishes one of them up to gibbet it." ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... continues, "but with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett, . . . the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett's supposed victim, having been attacked on the night in question by a violent bleeding of the nose, had risen ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... ob dese yere flibberty-gibbet niggers. I don' believe in hants an' ghostes, but they's some things which I does think is signs of death. Ef somebody brings a axe in de house hits a sho sign. Yer better watch when a cow lows arter dark, or a dog barks at de moon in front uv ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... Galen Galeren Galyene Game at Chesse Ganazath, John of Gaunt Gauchay, H. de Gauchy, H. de Gazee, Angelin Genoa Geometry Gereon, St. Gesta Romanorum Ghent, White-friars Gibbet Gifts Gildo Gilles de Rome. See Colonna. Gluttony Godaches Godebert Golden Legend Goldsmiths Good old times Goribert Goribald Government of wise men Graesse, J.G.T. Grammarians Gregory Nazianzen Grenville ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... round, like open presses, That shaw'd the Dead in their last dresses; And (by some devilish cantraip sleight) Each in its cauld hand held a light. By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes, in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristened bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gabudid gape; Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted: Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter which a ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... beheld his first view end In a favourite prospects church that was ruin'd- But alas! what a sight did the next cut exhibit! At the end of the walk hung a rogue on a gibbet! He beheld it and wept, for it caused him to muse on Full many a Campbell that died with his shoes on. All amazed and aghast at the ominous scene, He order'd it quick to be closed up again With a clump of Scotch firs that served for ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... place I ever saw. Is that a swing in front of that cottage? No, it's a gibbet. Why, they've all got 'em! I suppose they're for the summer tenants at the close of the season. What a rush there would be for them if the boat should happen to go off and leave ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... attended by the triumphant lords, who despised his milder virtues, his preferences and tastes, not one of whom could manage either pencil or lute, who cared for none of these things—while his strained eyes could still see nothing but the vision against the daylight, the impromptu gibbet of the high-arched bridge over the Border stream, where his familiar friends had been strung up with every sign of infamy. He had to contain within himself the rage, the shame, the grief and loneliness of his ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... round, like open presses; That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip slight Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; A knife, a father's throat had mangled, Whom ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... from my comrade; and, through fear Dismounting, down the rough and stony moor I led my horse, and, stumbling on, at length Came to a bottom, where in former times 235 A murderer had been hung in iron chains. The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones And iron case were gone; but on the turf, Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought, Some unknown hand had carved the murderer's name. 240 The monumental letters were inscribed In times long past; but still, from year to year, By superstition of the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... like open presses, That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And, by some devilish cantrip slight, Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; A knife, a father's throat had mangled, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... speech together with even more of his contempt for the bulk of his fellow-men. "No, Mrs. Cranston," said he, "don't wait a day for her. Start just as soon as you are ready, and don't give a thought to this little flibberty gibbet." And so the Cranstons, with Miss Loomis, bade farewell to Scott, and one radiant winter morning drove buoyantly away, almost all of the officers and ladies being out to wave them adieu. Hastings, with a brace of troopers, trotted alongside as they crossed the Platte and reported the ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... Abbey stands, on the Common hard by, His gibbet is now to be seen; His irons you still from the road may espy; The traveller beholds them, and thinks with a sigh Of poor Mary, ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... quiet compulsion and conciliation to which Elizabeth had trusted for the religious reunion of her subjects was foiled; and the English Catholics, fined, imprisoned at every crisis of national danger, and deprived of their teachers by the prison and the gibbet, were severed more hopelessly than ever from the national Church. A fresh impulse was thus given to the growing current of opinion which was to bring England at last to recognize the right of every man to freedom both of conscience and of worship. "In Henry's days, the father of this Elizabeth," ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... urbanity and candor merely to conceal an incapable and huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... battlemented tower. And must he fly—the grand vizier! the pasha of three tails! O'er the horizon's bounding hills, where distant vision fails, All stealthily, with eyes on earth, and shrinking from the sight, As a nocturnal robber holds his dark and breathless flight, And thinks he sees the gibbet spread its arms in solemn wrath, In every tree that dimly throws its shadow on ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... I was a Highland outlaw of the Rebellion. Always I fought for a lost cause, and always my sympathies were with the rebel. I feasted with Robin Hood on the King's venison; I fared forth with Dick Turpin on the gibbet-haunted heath; I followed Morgan, the Buccaneer, into strange and exotic lands of trial and treasure. It was a wonderful gift of visioning that was mine in those days. It was the bird-like flight of the pure child-mind to whom the unreal is ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... his side offering a glass of liquor on a tray. The scene well depicts the low estate to which White's had fallen. It recalls a bit of dialogue from Farquhar's Beaux' Stratagem (act III, scene 2), where Aimwell says to Gibbet, who is a highwayman: "Pray, sir, ha'nt I seen your face at Will's Coffee House?" "Yes sir, and at White's, too," answers ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... masterly excellence. A portfolio was filled with sketches of equal skill,—but these last were mostly subjects that appalled the eye and revolted the taste: they displayed the human figure in every variety of suffering,—the rack, the wheel, the gibbet; all that cruelty has invented to sharpen the pangs of death seemed yet more dreadful from the passionate gusto and earnest force of the designer. And some of the countenances of those thus delineated were sufficiently removed from the ideal to show that they were portraits; in a large, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... pronounc'd with Noise, When constru'd, but for a plain Yeoman go, And a good sober Two-pence, and well so. Hence then,'you Proud Imposters, get you gone, You Picts in Gentry and Devotion, You Scandal to the Stock of Verse, a Race Able to bring the Gibbet in Disgrace. Hyperbolus by suffering did traduce The Ostracism, and sham'd it out of Use. The Indian that Heaven did forswear Because he heard some Spaniards were there. Had he but known what Scots in Hell ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... with him! To the castle! He will lodge to-night in the deepest dungeon of yon fortification," pointing to the Curfew Tower above them, "there to await the king's judgment; and to-morrow night it will be well for him if he is not swinging from the gibbet near the bridge. Bring ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... take the hundred reals, and, some time to-morrow, be sure you get out of this island, nor set foot in it again these ten years, unless you would finish your banishment in the next life: for if I find you here, I will make you swing on a gibbet—at least the hangman shall do it for me: so let no man reply, or ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... would do any good to the rising generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post, gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the purpose. My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws and jails hardened them in their evil courses, or that their wonderful escapes were effected by the ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... loud cannon plane Death's lightning-riven lane, Levelling that unskill'd valour, rude, unled: —Yet happier in their fate Than whom the war-fiends wait To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering dead! ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... for a few seconds an uncovered face, with an expression of terror upon it, of which I have never imagined the like. It seemed as if the man, whoever he was, was being forcibly lifted, with his arms somehow pinioned or held back, towards the little gibbet on the stage. I could just see the nightcapped head behind him. Then there was a cry and a crash. The whole show-box fell over backwards; kicking legs were seen among the ruins, and then two figures—as some said; I can only answer for one—were visible running at top speed across the square ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... receives it defined in bulk and quality from the law's own hand, and the wretch who will rob him of an ounce of it is a felon without a felon's excuse; and as a felon I will proceed against him by the dog-whip of the criminal law, by the gibbet of the public press, and by every weapon that wit and honesty have ever found to scourge cruelty and theft since ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... Mr. Schmidt, by train and motor, getting off at stations unexpectedly, hopping into trains going in any direction but the right one, sleeping in strange beds and doing all manner of queer things. And here we are at last. I am sure you must look upon me as a very silly, flibberty-gibbet creature." ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... This was no part of the sentence, but was performed in accordance with a special order or direction of the court, given, probably, in most cases, verbally to the sheriff. After execution, the body of the felon was taken from the gallows and hung upon a gibbet conveniently near the place where the fact was committed, there to remain, until, from the action of the elements, or the ravages of birds of prey, it disappeared. Of the object of this ghastly feature of capital punishment it is alleged, "besides the terror of the example," "that it is a comfortable ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe, and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated; wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed. Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully leaping from the whale's mouth, like Harlequin through ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... give them no actual assistance, situated as I was"—here the narrator smiled as he glanced round upon his guests—"it would have been simply absurd, you know, the idea of my putting men on board to keep her afloat for the nearest gibbet. Bah! I did not dream of such ridiculous nonsense. However, I determined to make her a visit, and, if there should be any thing to save from the wreck in an undamaged condition, why, I ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... you do not exceed it," replied Solomon Eagle. "Lift a finger against either of these young persons, and I will reveal all. Yes," he continued, menacingly, "I will disclose such dreadful things against you, that you will assuredly be adjudged to a gibbet higher than the highest tower ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... narratives gives an image, far from flattering, of the life and manners of his own time. It is he who tells of the robber who, being accustomed to commend himself in his adventures to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three days by her white hands, and received his pardon; and of the illiterate monk who suffered shame because he knew no more than his Ave Maria, but who, when dead, was proved a holy man by the five roses that came from his ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... surly grace; But, lost in thoughtless ease and empty show, Behold the warriour dwindled to a beau; Sense, freedom, piety, refin'd away, Of France the mimick, and of Spain the prey. All that at home no more can beg or steal, Or like a gibbet better than a wheel; Hiss'd from the stage, or hooted from the court, Their air, their dress, their politicks, import; [p]Obsequious, artful, voluble and gay, On Britain's fond credulity they prey. No gainful trade their industry can 'scape, [q]They sing, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... months ago, I wandered through the hospital, I found not a child that seemed to have heard of his creed, or the commandments. To breed up children in this manner, is to rescue them from an early grave, that they may find employment for the gibbet; from dying in innocence, that they may perish ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Lucien was paid off. The creditors did not even lose confidence. Lucien and his evil genius could breathe for a moment. Like some pool, they could start again along the edge of the precipice where the strong man was guiding the weak man to the gibbet or ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... murderer took all the money Wilson had, which was only one five-pound note, the number of which Raibey knew. A woman tried to pass it in Launceston, and her statements led to the discovery and conviction of the murderer, who was hanged in chains at the White Hills, and the gibbet remained there for ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... Cambridge, and Huntingdon. He surprised several bodies of peasants and utterly defeated them. The prisoners taken were brought before him, and putting off the complete armour which he wore, he heard the confession of his captives, gave them absolution, and then sent them straight to the gibbet. With the return of the peasants to their homes the gentlemen from the country were able to come with their retainers to town, and Richard found himself at the head of ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... deadliest place I ever saw. Is that a swing in front of that cottage? No, it's a gibbet. Why, they've all got 'em! I suppose they're for the summer tenants at the close of the season. What a rush there would be for them if the boat should happen to go off and leave ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... by profession may be exterminated wherever they are seized; for they attack and injure all nations by trampling under foot the foundations of their common safety. Thus pirates are brought to the gibbet by the first into whose hands they fall. If the sovereign of the country where crimes of that nature have been committed reclaims the authors of them in order to bring them to punishment, they ought to be ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the great four-square gibbet which had made an end of Ritterdom in Plassenburg, I noted that there was a gathering of the hooded folk—the carrion crows. And lo! there before me, already comfortably a-swing, were our late foes, the two bravoes, and in the middle the dead Cannstadt ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... "we have met with Christians at last. When men speak of the gibbet, I know that they have served the Lord and will fight the devil. To-night you have fought four devils instead of one, and like ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Abbey stands, on the common hard by His gibbet is now to be seen. Not far from the road it engages the eye, The Traveller beholds it, and thinks with a sigh Of poor Mary ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... shall hear. I first took them down Feather-bed Lane, where we stuck fast in the mud. I then rattled them crack over the stones of Up-and-down Hill. I then introduced them to the gibbet on Heavy-tree Heath; and from that, with a circumbendibus, I fairly lodged them in the horse-pond at the ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... all are children, there is need of a master! Don't look at me like that, man! And for my cousin, let her hear the truth for once! Let her know what men who have seen the world think of the visions, from which she would have awakened in a dungeon, and the poor fools, her fellow-dupes, under the gibbet! A great rising for a great cause, if it be real, man, if it be earnest, if it be based on forethought and some calculation of the chances, God knows I hold it a fine thing, and a high thing! But the rising of a child with a bladder against an armed man, a rising that can ruin but cannot ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... am purposed to say about Christmas. Don't ask me yet what that Thing is. Truth dwells in no man, but is a shy beast you must hunt as you may in the forests that are round about the Walls of Heaven. And I do hereby curse, gibbet, and denounce in execrationem perpetuam atque aeternam the man who hunts in a crafty or calculating way—as, lying low, nosing for scents, squinting for trails, crawling noiselessly till he shall come near to his ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... geometrical tracings in the sand. But on a bleak moor in the twilight they saw the black beams of a gibbet, and below the cross-piece, swinging in the wind, they saw a human skeleton with bony wrists and ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... sneak out of the world. God will not allow it merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would not ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... served a grand dinner to the duke and his company, without any other preparation than having to open a box with three shelves; and to wind up the wonders, he had ordered three robbers, who were dead and hung to a gibbet, to come down from it, and come and make their bow to the duke, and then to go back and resume their place at the gallows. It was said, moreover, that on another occasion he had commanded the personages in a piece of tapestry to detach themselves from it, and to come and present ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Madame Sand's taste and higher art-instincts would have revolted against the practice—now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers—of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations to each other, which, indeed, had ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... no one in Communipaw could understand. Some thought him a negro just from Guinea, who had either fallen overboard, or escaped from a slave-ship. Nothing, however, could ever draw from him any account of his origin. When questioned on the subject, he merely pointed to Gibbet-Island, a small rocky islet, which lies in the open bay, just opposite to Communipaw, as if that were his native place, though every body knew it had ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... your late leader," replied Jorworth, his eyes, while he was speaking, glancing with the vindictive ferocity which dictated his answer. "So many strangers as be here amongst ye, so many bodies to the ravens, so many heads to the gibbet!—It is long since the kites have had such a banquet of lurdane Flemings ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I wish they would inquire whether there might not be a Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant qualities—had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and try to become ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... we made for the Port, while English men-at-arms might be plainly seen and heard, gazing, waving their hands, and shouting from the battlements of the two gate-towers. Down the road we ran, past certain small houses of peasants, and past a gibbet with a marauder hanging from it, just over ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... the song did last year. The tories are all ashamed of this, as they were of that; the author is not yet certainly known, though I think I am within a week of detecting him for certain. If I should, I shall try to cure him once for all, by stringing him up, not bodily, but in such a way as shall gibbet his memory in terrorem. It lies between Bernard, Waterhouse, and Jonathan Sewall. The first, they say, has not wit enough to write anything; the second swears off; and the third must plead guilty or not guilty as soon ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... unfortunate will be recommended to the Queen's mercy, and escape hanging, unless, as might be just possible, she prefers depending on a gibbet to the tender mercies of Christian society—especially its women—towards a woman who, after being seduced by ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... familiarized to Greek and Latin, though a stranger to his vernacular literature; and that a verbal critic may sometimes be successful in his attempts on a single word, though he may be incapable of tasting an entire sentence. Let it also remain as a gibbet on the high roads of literature; that "conjectural critics" as they pass may not forget ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the road to Fenworth branches off, and the handpost stands. A gibbet once stood there not onconnected with our ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... world temptations also arise and difficulties spring up. In this land, the enemies of religion, have not power to kill and destroy the faithful; but they have power to pour contempt upon them. Cruel mockings may severely try those who fear neither the gibbet, nor the stake. These do try the people of ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... favourite speeches from our best plays. We are resolved to convert the great hall into a theatre, and get up the Beaux Stratagem without delay — I think I shall make no contemptible figure in the character of Scrub; and Lismahago will be very great in Captain Gibbet. Wilson undertakes to entertain the country people with Harlequin Skeleton, for which he has got a jacket ready ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... jury had, of course, been already unravelled by previous historians. Fitzjames was able, however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was moored was about three miles below Chatham; and is named from the village ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... and rayment, so they took Religion for their temptress and their cook.— Hence then you proud impostors get you gone, You Picts in gentry and devotion. You scandal to the stock of verse, a race Able to bring the gibbet in disgrace.— ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... to the rising generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post, gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the purpose. My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws and jails hardened them in their evil courses, or ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... 'tis indignation shakes me. With this sabre I'll slice him as small as atoms; he shall be doomed by the judge, and damned upon the gibbet. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Bow, where he defended himself by force of arms. He was at last forced from his retreat, condemned, and executed, amidst the regrets of the populace, who were so devoted to his memory, that they stole his gibbet, paid the same veneration to it as to the cross, and were equally zealous in propagating and attesting reports of the miracles wrought by it [p]. But though the sectaries of this superstition were punished by the justiciary [q], it received ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier," Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos." He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... foreign possessions, and to retire to his hereditary dominions. "What a severe sentence," exclaimed Count Zinzendorf, the emperor's ambassador, "have you passed on the emperor. No malefactor was ever carried with so hard a doom to the gibbet." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... what is the best road to show you? Aye, which? Ah! there's the road of the gibbet and the rope. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... judges themselves were taken into custody and had not the better counsel of the staid and solid men prevailed, the sheriff and those who aided him might have been hung to a gibbet erected in the court-house yard. On the fifteenth Captain Cochran and forty Green Mountain Boys, who had been apprised of the terrible affair, marched over the mountain to arraign themselves upon the side of the Whigs if the matter should come to real warfare. But fortunately further bloodshed was ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Ostend consisted altogether of some score of houses and three hundred cottages, huts or hovels built of the driftwood of wrecked vessels, it nevertheless rejoiced in the possession of a governor, a garrison, a forked gibbet, a convent, and a burgomaster, in short, in all the institutions ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... half-emptied purse, is not likely to possess it long, for an adroit professor of legerdemain has taken aim with a hooked stick, and by one slight jerk, will convey it to his own pocket. The profession of a gentleman in a round wig is determined by a gibbet chalked upon his coat. An enraged barber, who lifts up his stick in the corner, has probably been refused payment of a wager, by the man at whom ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... a full-length figure of Hope, with dark hair, dressed in a red dress with large falling collar, having a blue flower at the point. In her left hand she holds an anchor. In the distant background is a cottage and a gibbet on a hill, the sun with rays just appearing under a cloud. On the hilly foreground is a red lily, and further afield a caterpillar and a strawberry plant. On the lower cover is a full-length figure of Faith, with fair hair, dressed in a blue dress with large falling ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... there weren't more of them watching the condemned man's march to the gibbet: the word that the Secretary had called me in must have gotten all over the Department since ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... laws of all well governed countries dispose of the remains of notorious felons, who, instead of being suffered to repose in the grave, are denied all interment; their bodies being delivered over to the surgeons for the benefit of science, or exposed on a gibbet, till the crows, eagles and vultures, devour their flesh, and then, even their bones are left to blacken in the winter's blast, as a warning to man, to shun the deeds that led them ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... his majesty. To the castle with him! To the castle! He will lodge to-night in the deepest dungeon of yon fortification," pointing to the Curfew Tower above them, "there to await the king's judgment; and to-morrow night it will be well for him if he is not swinging from the gibbet near the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Stirn, who still, in a whisper, accused the Papishers. And, finally, there appeared amongst the other graphic embellishments which the poor stocks had received, the rude gravure of a gentleman in a broad-brimmed hat and top-boots, suspended from a gibbet, with the inscription beneath—"A warnin to hall tirans—mind your ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Shall they hoist me up And show me to the shouting varletry Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt Be gentle grave unto me! rather on Nilus' mud Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies Blow me into abhorring! rather make My country's high pyramides my gibbet, And hang ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... the ship until he could restore order. The sequel was that he received the august thanks of the Viceroy of Chili and a gold medal from His Catholic Majesty. As was the custom, the guilty slaves, poor wretches, were condemned to be dragged to the gibbet at the tails of mules, to be hanged, their bodies burned, and their heads stuck ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... the good citizens of Paris, to whom they were wholly obnoxious, and who occasionally repaid their aggressions with interest. In 1407 two of their number, convicted of assassination and robbery, were condemned to the gibbet, and the sentence was carried into execution; but so great was the uproar occasioned in the university by this violation of its immunities that the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, was compelled to take down their bodies from Montfaucon ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... through, and, heralded by jeers and much applause came a procession of the proletariat, of odds and ends, soldiers and shop-girls, mechanics and street-sweepers and cabmen and students, carrying an effigy of the Kaiser on a gibbet. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... i is hard, as give, except in giant, gigantick, gibbet, gibe, giblets, Giles, gill, gilliflower, gin, ginger, gingle, to which may be ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... against a soldier of his, for that returning alone from forage he could give him no account where he had left a companion of his, took it for granted that he had killed him, and presently condemned him to death. He was no sooner mounted upon the gibbet, but, behold, his wandering companion arrives, at which all the army were exceedingly glad, and after many embraces of the two comrades, the hangman carried both the one and the other into Piso's presence, all those present believing ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Guarded themselves, but forc'd the bloody thieves, Being got between them, and this hellish Cave, For safety of their lives, to fly up higher Into the woods, all left to their possession, This sav'd your Brother, and your nephew from The gibbet, this redeem'd me from my Chains, And gave my friend his liberty, this preserv'd Your honour ready ...
— The Little French Lawyer - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont
... ready at eight o'clock, with their carbines clean, and a round of ball-cartridge each. Keep them sober; and, further, plant two upright posts at the near end of the bridge, with a cross one at top, in the manner of a gibbet. See to these matters, Hewson: I shall be with ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... "You're a great gibbet! You always manage me. Well, let us rather go to the 'pater' than to the rabbi; but at least let my servants ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... presses, That shaw'd the Dead in their last dresses; And (by some devilish cantraip sleight) Each in its cauld hand held a light. By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes, in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristened bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gabudid gape; Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted: Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter which a babe had strangled: A knife, a father's throat had mangled. Whom his ain ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... accustomed to danger, be cool-blooded, alive to the sentiment of honor, and above all, sensitive to that stern military code which, to the imagination of the soldier, ever holds out to him the provost's gibbet to which he is sure to rise, should he strike one blow too many. Should all these restraints, inward as well as outward, be wanting, the man plunges into insurrection. He is a novice in the acts of violence, which he carries out. He has no fear of the law, because he abolishes it. The action begun ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,' and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... messenger should be hanged. Frontenac knew well how to deal with such a situation. He threw the letter in the envoy's face and turned his back upon him. The unhappy man, who understood French, heard the Governor give orders that a gibbet should be erected on which he was to be hanged. When the Bishop and the Intendant pleaded for mercy, Frontenac seemed to yield. He would not take, he said, an hour to reply, but would answer at once. He knew no such person as King William. James, though in exile, was the true King of ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... the thickets, and, seizing the stranger, hauled him from his horse and bore him away. To this succeeded another scene. He stood with a great multitude near by some foreign town. A bustle was heard, and he beheld the horseman of his earlier dream again led along a captive. A gibbet was erected, and the prisoner was at once hanged. In narrating this tale, Cunningham averred that the features of its hero were still fresh in his recollection; the door opened, and in the face of Andre, who at that moment presented himself, he professed to recognize ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... Hoogerbetz was also condemned to perpetual banishment. The body of Ledemberg, Secretary of the States of Utrecht, who, as hath been said, put an end to his life in gaol, was affixed in the coffin to a gibbet. Moerbergen, Counsellor of Utrecht, had only his country-house, for his prison, because, suffering himself to be moved by the tears of his wife and children, he made a kind of submission bordering on those which they wanted to draw from Hoogerbetz ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... stood round, like open presses; That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip slight Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast, that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places. Upon this, I who took the boldness to speak ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... thought a knave, or fool, Or bigot, plotting crime, Who, for the advancement of his kind, Is wiser than his time. For him the hemlock shall distil; For him the axe be bared; For him the gibbet shall be built; For him the stake prepared. Him shall the scorn and wrath of men Pursue with deadly aim; And malice, envy, spite, and lies, Shall desecrate his name. But Truth shall conquer at the last, For round and round we run; And ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... name]: Old Dessauer, at sight of so many images of that bird, threw out the observation, loud enough, from the top of the table, 'Hah, Walrave, I see you are making yourself acquainted with the RAVENS in time, that they may not be strange to you at last,'"—when they come to eat you on the gibbet! (not a soft tongue, the Old Dessauer's). "Another day, seeing Walrave seated between two Jesuit Guests, the Prince said: 'Ah, there you are right, Walrave; there you sit safe; the Devil can't get you there!' As the Prince kept continually ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... moderately apportioned to offences in the time of Solon, partly from the high price of money, but partly, also, from the wise moderation of the lawgiver. The last grave penalty of death was of various kinds, as the cross, the gibbet, the precipice, the bowl—afflictions seldom in reserve ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... my duty without malice, and with a light heart, and I never love a man better than when I have put my scant of wind collar about his neck, to dub him Knight of the order of Saint Patibularius [patibulum, a gibbet], as the Provost's Chaplain, the worthy Father Vaconeldiablo [possibly Baco (Bacchus) el Diablo (the Devil)], is wont to call the Patron ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... of an individual may be safely left to himself as most interested in them, except so far as they can be affected by argument or friendly monition; that the idea of compelling belief in particular doctrines is a solecism, as absurd as wicked; and, so far from condemning to the stake, or the gibbet, men who pertinaciously adhere to their conscientious opinions in contempt of personal interests and in the face of danger, we should rather feel disposed to imitate the spirit of antiquity in raising altars and statues to their memory, as having displayed the highest efforts of ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... pitiable, and melancholy garb; in its hour of degradation, craziness, and desperation. He had his recreation in such a spectacle, as men can find their pleasure in the death-struggle of a malefacter on the gibbet. He came, not to join the miserable throng that crowded round the tables, exhibiting every variety of low, unhealthy feeling; nor did he come, in truth, prepared to meet with one in whose affairs and conduct he had so deep an interest. It was with inexpressible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... him there. He would go because there was no one else on the country side that would dare. But I had no pride of that sort. I was quite of the same way of thinking as the others, and would as soon have thought of passing my night at Jacob's gibbet on Ditchling Common as in the haunted house of Cliffe Royal. Still, I could not bring myself to desert Jim; and so, as I say, I slunk about the house with so pale and peaky a face that my dear mother would have it that I had been at the green apples, and sent me to bed early ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Stripped of the sophistical argumentation in which this doctrine has been habited, its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection against the laws of the United States; to interpose the arm of state sovereignty between rebellion and the halter, and to rescue the traitor from the gibbet. Although conducted under the auspices of state sovereignty, it would not the less be levying war against the Union; but, as a state cannot be punished for treason, nullification cases herself in the complete steel of sovereign ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... vexed, tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab of the desert—I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I might end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in your French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have my head until I had crushed ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... case proveth capital. And yet the late severity in France was more, where by a kind of martial law, established by ordinance of the King and Parliament, the party that had slain another was presently had to the gibbet, insomuch as gentlemen of great quality were hanged, their wounds bleeding, lest a natural death should prevent the example of justice. But, my lords, the course which we shall take is of far greater lenity, and yet of no less efficacy; ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Saul, it seems, had no quarrel with the Twelve; his hatred and fanaticism were aroused against a sect of Hellenist Jews who openly proclaimed that the Law had been abrogated in advance by their Master, who, as Saul observed with horror, had incurred the curse of the Law by dying on a gibbet. All the Pharisee in him was revolted; and he led the savage heretic-hunt which ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... to carry the civilization of Massachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... censure. When the Dutch fleet was in the Thames, it was against the Chancellor that the rage of the populace was chiefly directed. His windows were broken; the trees of his garden were cut down; and a gibbet was set up before his door. But nowhere was he more detested than in the House of Commons. He was unable to perceive that the time was fast approaching when that House, if it continued to exist at all, must be supreme in ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from motives of humanity is not now known. This seems to have been the fashion in France also, for in 1331 a woman named Duplas was scourged and buried alive at Abbeville, and in 1460 Perotte Mauger, a receiver of stolen goods, was inhumed by order of the Provost of Paris in front of the public gibbet. In Germany in the good old days certain kinds of female criminals were "impaled," a punishment too grotesquely horrible for description, but likely enough considered by the simple German of the period ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old Sylvanus and the sister nymphs—as Virgil sang; ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... letters: "Guilty of high treason." Then the wretched General shivered from head to foot. Every detail of the melodramatic execution seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron. He fancied he could see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray pall. He saw, in the hollow square formed by a battalion of Cossack infantry, the executioner, Froloff, in his red shirt and his plush trousers tucked into his boots, and, beside him, a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the roads. On all occasions the drovers were armed with various weapons to defend their charge from the cattle-stealers who were too often apt to hang upon their skirts, ready to carry off any stray beast they could find, though the gibbet was the penalty if they were captured. Trains of pack-horses also would bear them company as they approached Cambridge, carrying all kinds of stores and goods for ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... not exactly." he hummed. "You don't taste the full force of the joke yet. In a week's time you will build me a big gibbet in the Place de Greve, and there your last task as Grand Constable will be to hang ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the young girl, and at the background of the Place cast a pallid reflection, on one side upon the ancient, black, and wrinkled facade of the House of Pillars, on the other, upon the old stone gibbet. ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... to their annihilation. As they have dealt with me, so shall I deal with them. I shall grind them to powder, and strew their dust upon the air. There shall be a spy in every man's house, a traitor on every hearth, a hangman in every village, a gibbet in every square. Plague, leprosy, or fever shall be less deadly than my wrath; I will make every frontier a grave-yard, every province a lazar-house, and cure the sick by the sword. I shall have peace in Russia, though it be the peace of the dead. Who said I was a coward? Who said I was afraid? ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... down and made a hole in the floor; meanwhile the duke hung the crawfish up by a thread. Then he placed the gibbet in the middle of the room, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! - I say, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, and attributed supernatural powers to the plant. It was said to grow only beneath a murderer's gibbet, and when torn from the earth by its root to utter a shriek which none might hear and live. From earliest times, in the East, a notion prevailed that the mandrake would remove sterility. With which purpose in view, Rachel said to ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... naked slope of a poor province A Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet, Then he said, "Surely this was a righteous man," And a new chapter of history opened, Having that ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
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