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More "Insidious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from assuming its reader to possess any particular information on any subject whatever. The author who writes over the head of the public is the most dangerous enemy of his publisher—and the most insidious as well, because so many publishers are in private life interested in literary matters, and would readily permit this personal foible to influence the exercise of their vocation were it possible to do so upon the preferable ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... harmless partridge drop from their flight, weltering in their blood, or, perhaps, perishing with wounds and hunger, under the cover of some friendly thicket to which they have in vain retreated for safety; they triumph over the unsuspecting fish whom they have decoyed by an insidious pretence of feeding, and drag him from his native element by a hook fixed to and tearing out his entrails; and, to add to all this, they spare neither labour nor expense to preserve and propagate these innocent animals, for no other ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... had hitherto been an honest woman. Now, in resolving to keep the purse, she but yielded to a further stage of that insidious malady which for so long had been finding ample growth in her moral and spiritual nature. She did not, however, know that the purse was Cecile's. The child's agony, and even terror, she put down with considerable alacrity to an evil conscience. ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... or other subterfuges. Others again spent the whole of the period of the sermon, except for some delicious moments of surreptitious sleep, in a painful but altogether commendable struggle against the insidious influence ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... to Paul with a look of more favour than he had yet shown him. "Bultitude," he said, "I am obliged to you. A severe cold in the head has rendered me incapable of detecting this insidious act of insubordination and self-indulgence, on which I shall have more to say on another occasion. Your moral courage and promptness in denouncing the evil thing are much to ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... together, it must play at parry and thrust with the very forces which gave it birth. Once having happened, it so acts as to persist. But it should be remarked that this opposition between the careless and rough course of the cosmos, the insidious forces of dissolution, on the one hand, and the self-preserving care of the organism on the other, is present absolutely from the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks. Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom not only political ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disposition gave Innocent more hopes of success; and he offered him the crown of Sicily for his second son, Edmond.[**] Henry, allured by so magnificent a present, without reflecting on the consequences, without consulting either with his brother or the parliament, accepted of the insidious proposal, and gave the pope unlimited credit to expend whatever sums he thought necessary for completing the conquest of Sicily. Innocent, who was engaged by his own interests to wage war with Mainfroy, was glad to carry ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... Reformation period, these persons were considered to be in the actual service of the devil, who was then thought to be raising a more determined opposition than ever to the spread of the kingdom of God, and adopting the insidious means of enlisting men and women into his service by conferring upon them supernatural powers; so that by this contract they were bound to do mischief to all good Christian people; and the more mischief they could ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... foresaw and warned us against this most insidious proposition to divide our country into separate confederacies, no matter how strict the alliances between them might be; and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... another little FIFE being added to the harmonious Royal Band, while the loyal public is mightily pleased thus to have it proved to ocular demonstration, that the subtle villain, Influenza, has been baulked in his traitorous attempt on the Royal Personage, and they sincerely hope that the insidious poisoner, being thus arrested in his course, may, with all his treacherous bacilli, be for ever banished this happy ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... There is an insidious foe to mastery and freedom, which dooms millions to self-imposed bondage. Most people know it has them in its grip; countless others do not know what the hidden power is which holds them from the richer, freer, happier conditions ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... pursuance of this system in the month of June last, at the very time that they opened their treaty in Europe, he proposed to offer the most advantageous terms to America upon condition that the Americans laid down their arms and left France to settle the dispute alone. This insidious conduct was pursued during ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... if we occasionally opened our mouths, we took good care not to shut our eyes, and were constantly on the alert. There is a far from pleasant feeling attached to lying in an open boat, in a night as dark as pitch, expecting a momentary attack from an insidious enemy, and wholly in a state of uncertainty as to from what quarter it may be made, or as to what odds you may be exposed. Under these circumstances, we remained in watching and silence during a night which appeared interminably long; and daylight was gladly welcomed by the whole party; and when ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... Pererepenko has designs upon my life; and on the 7th of last month, cherishing this design in secret, he came to me, and began, in a friendly and insidious manner, to ask of me a gun which was in my chamber, and offered me for it, with the miserliness peculiar to him, many worthless objects, such as a brown sow and two sacks of oats. Divining at that ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... his voice, and drove the insidious words into her tender bosom. She began to tremble and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... blame Grenfell," he said at last. "He had his way to make. I know how blinding the glamour of ambition is, how insidious and insistent the claims of the world may become. I don't pretend to be superior to certain temptations if they came in my way. But I happen to have kept out of their way. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... had impressed itself on all the army, and inspired a caution that was but too much needed; since, except Washington's men and a few others among the provincials, the whole, from general to drummer-boy, were total strangers to that insidious warfare of the forest in which their enemies, red and white, had no rival. Instead of marching, like Braddock, at one stretch for Fort Duquesne, burdened with a long and cumbrous baggage-train, it was the plan of Forbes to push on by slow stages, establishing ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... generally guided by the distresses of his neighbours, for whom, as for his prey, he unceasingly lay in wait; and his preparatory measures were taken with such secrecy that the execution alone unravelled them. Insidious political craft and wanton delight in blood united in him to complete ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... that there lurk in the proposition for the free coinage of silver, so strongly approved and so enthusiastically advocated by a multitude of my countrymen, a serious menace to our prosperity and an insidious temptation of our people to wander from the allegiance they owe to public and private integrity. It is because I do not distrust the good faith and sincerity of those who press this scheme that I have imperfectly but with zeal submitted my thoughts upon this momentous subject. ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... mind and act upon it. No more intoxicants for me, thank you. Mr O'Toole, accept my thanks for telling us that terrible story of your shipwreck. It has brought home to me, as nothing else has ever done, the awful danger of tampering with so insidious an enemy as alcohol, which I now solemnly abjure ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... with a sudden sharp look in the depths of the lack-lustre eyes. Already it began to strike me that, though the pea-green young man was inane, he had his due proportion of a certain insidious practical cunning. 'That's true,' he answered, measuring me. 'And according to her, almost everybody's a fool—especially her relations. There's a fine knack of sweeping generalisation about deah ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... doctor of music, whose mind was occupied chiefly by elementary exercises that should tend to draw the incipient conceits of youth away from the alluring empty fifth (a form in which his other self delighted), and the equally insidious octave parallel. At times he advanced to laws of even greater moment, and corresponding intricacy. For he took a genuine interest in his pupils; and, in that first year of his teaching, carried his ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... high power rays, as well as of inorganic minerals, is very slow and insidious, manifesting only in the course of many years. This new field of therapeutics, therefore, has not yet passed the stage ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... chief strain of Collins's "Discourse" is an eulogium upon the necessity and advantage of Freethinking; in which it is more than insinuated that the advocates of revealed religion are enemies to the progress of enlightened inquiry. This insidious position is ridiculed ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... ironically and suddenly swerve into serious utterance; or we have been speaking seriously and then incongruously adopt an ironic tone. How are our listeners, our readers to take us? They are puzzled; they do not know. In the second place, we offend—perhaps in insidious, indefinable fashion—the esthetic proprieties; we violate the natural fitness of things. For example, we have been speaking with colloquial freedom, sprinkling our discourse with shouldn't and won't; suddenly we be come formal and say should not and will not. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... and other chance words, which I have since forgotten, that M. de Rosny was pressing the king to accept the help of the King of Navarre, and warning him against the insidious offers of the Vicomte de Turenne. The mention of a Republic, however, seemed to excite his Majesty's wrath rather against Rosny for presuming to refer to such a thing than against Turenne, to whom he refused to credit it. He paused near my ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... than Berlin, viewed these political changes with even greater apathy. This fine province had, during the reign of Frederick the Great, been placed under the government of the minister, Count Hoym, whose easy disposition had, like insidious poison, utterly enervated the people. The government officers, as if persuaded of the reality of the antiquarian whim which deduced the name of Silesia from Elysium, dwelt in placid self-content, unmoved by the catastrophes of Austerlitz or Jena. No measures were, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... could have at my early age to a free, independent judgment. But I will not any longer assist in duping the reader; and I will therefore suggest to him two grounds of vehement suspicion against all the insidious colorings given to his statements ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 290 To every manly feeling callous grown, Rather than not blast thine, he 'll blast his own. To ope the fountain whence sedition springs, To slander government, and libel kings; With Freedom's name to serve a present hour, Though born and bred to arbitrary power; To talk of William with insidious art, Whilst a vile Stuart's lurking in his heart; And, whilst mean Envy rears her loathsome head, Flattering the living, to abuse the dead, 300 Where is Shebbeare?[173] Oh, let not foul reproach, Travelling thither in a city-coach, The ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... insidious and deadly disease is caused by a tiny vegetable growth derived from persons or animals already suffering from tuberculosis. The spit of consumptive patients swarms with such germs, and when it dries and becomes dust ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... afforded which shall inform them that their property or the country's freedom are endangered, and they will be found a rampart behind which all true patriots, the lovers of order and country, may rally, and which they may hold impregnable against the furious assault of the leveller, or the insidious sap of ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... the main, she would have been a plaything in the hands of such a man. Her absolute truth and crystal purity of principle incased her in heaven's armor, and neither he nor any other evil-disposed person could harm her. She would not listen to the first insidious suggestion of the tempter. Thus the man who expected to go away despising now honored, reverenced, loved her, and through her strong but gentle ministry had turned his back on evil, and was struggling to escape its ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... have been accustomed to judge and condemn them, representing as common to all the body the vices of a few of the members. Consequently, there is not one who does not read without shame and indignation the insidious motives and the defamatory expressions lavished against them in the ordinances of good government drawn up in Filipinas in 1768 [99]—which, although ordered to be modified by his Majesty, are now in force for lack of others, and are found, printed, in the hands of all. For even granting that ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... the noble Texan—guide, ranger, and hunter—thus sadly to succumb? No. Fate has not decreed his death by such insidious means. A circumstance, apparently accidental, steps in to save him. On this very day, when the poison it being prepared for him, the poisoner receives a summons that for the time at least, will frustrate his foul plans. His master commands him to make ready for a journey. It is an errand ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... when the sacrifice to Heaven would be offered, and he determined to wait and see whether the 1 費. 2 郈. 3 成. 4 In connexion with these events, the 'Narratives of the School' and Sze-ma Ch'ien mention the summary punishment inflicted by Confucius on an able but unscrupulous and insidious officer the Shaou chang, Maou (少正卯). His judgment and death occupy a conspicuous place in the legendary accounts. But the Analects, Tsze-sze, Mencius, and Tso Ch'iu-ming are all silent about it, and Chiang Yung rightly ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... of this play would be very conspicuous in any other piece, not only for their justness, but their strength. Cassio is brave, benevolent and honest, ruined only by his want of stubbornness to resist an insidious invitation. Roderigo's suspicious credulity, and impatient submission to the cheats which he sees practised upon him, and which, by persuasion, he suffers to be repeated, exhibit a strong picture of a weak mind betrayed ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... his own attitude here? That could not be answered, either, because only a future moment, over which he had no control, and which must decide events, held that secret. Worry beset Wade, but he still found himself proof against the insidious gloom ever ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... heart Of human beings much the same; Or polish'd by insidious art, Or rude as from the ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... Peter could not conceal from McGivney the fact that he was troubled over his bereavement; and so McGivney took him in hand and gave him a "jacking up." It was dangerous work, this of holding down the Reds; dangerous, because their doctrines were so insidious, they were so devilishly cunning in their working upon people's minds. McGivney had seen more than one fellow start fooling with their ideas and turn into one himself. Peter must guard ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... experienced bee-keeper, frequently swarm so often as to expose themselves to great danger of being destroyed by the moth. After the departure of the after-swarms, the parent colony often contains too few bees to cover and protect their combs from the insidious attacks of their wily enemy. As a number of weeks must elapse before the brood of the young queen is mature, the colony, for a considerable time, at the season when the moths are very numerous, are constantly diminishing in numbers, ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... splendour of thy noontide skies: 230 Then Fancy, sick of follies that deform The face of day, and in the sunshine swarm; Sick of the fluttering fopperies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age; Sick of smooth Sophistry's insidious cant, Or cold Impiety's defying rant; Sick of the muling sentiment that sighs O'er its dead bird, while Want unpitied cries; Sick of the pictures that pale Lust inflame, And flush the cheek of Love with deep, deep shame; 240 Would ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... the vital affairs of the clan could not be balked by consideration for a stranger, who, in the opinion of the majority, should be driven from the country as an insidious mischief-maker. Ostensibly, the truce still held, but at no time since its signing had matters been so freighted with the menace of a gathering storm. The attitude of each faction was that of several men standing quiet with ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... allowed so strong an expression—to aspire after your daughter's hand! Having nothing of his own to recommend him, and knowing that I am in his way, he does not cease to traduce me to your daughter on every occasion, and I fear the insidious poison of his oily tongue has already had a serious effect on her mind, which, if not put an end to, will turn her good opinion of me into dislike or even aversion. Why it was but a few days ago ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... world without,—servitors in fact which must not be ignored under penalty of transforming them into foes to his well-being. Disease makes him aware that by ignoring the claims of his inner relations he has been converting his very food, juices and gases into insidious and formidable poisons, which perforce he absorbs into his blood and tissues and circulates throughout his entire system. Thus does the disguised angel admonish the ignorant that the rights of the inner world must not be ignored—that one's ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... an insidious mixture of flattery and sarcasm in her words that, for a moment Ebben was at a loss what to answer, so Malen, the milkmaid, took the opportunity of changing ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... barbarous people is indeed the more miserable half of mankind: and it seems obvious that in those Eastern lands, where these traditions took their birth, the growth of venomous reptiles, the deadliest and most insidious of man's natural enemies, should suggest the idea of the type ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... society women while in theatres sit grossly intoxicated from eating these candies filled with brandy. When the fire fiend sweeps down upon them they are unable to escape. The candy stores are the devil's distilleries. If you assist in the distribution of these insidious confections you assist in the destruction of the bodies and souls of your fellow-beings, and in the filling of our jails, asylums and almshouses. Think, girl, ere you touch the money for ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... early learn indeed To bear affliction's yoke. Yet weep not, for you all have heard, Oft from these lips, in health, How Death will often snatch away Mothers by mystic stealth. How often, when within the home The sun of joy doth glow, Some deed of his insidious hand Will ...
— Caleb in the Country • Jacob Abbott
... popular eye, to the popular eye—but I knew when I was dropping information and when I was letting drive at the court with an insidious argument. But the court knew it, bless you, and weakened every time! And Brabant knew it. I just reminded him of it in a quiet way, and its final result, and he said in a whisper, 'You did it, Colonel, you did it, sir—but keep it mum for my sake; and I'll tell you what ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... and clefts of rocks,{1} well as darkness, correspond to falsities, as light corresponds to truths. It is their delight to dwell in such places, and undelightful to dwell in the open country. [2] Those that have taken delight in insidious and secret plots and in treacherous machinations do the same thing. They are also in such caves; and they frequent rooms so dark that they are even unable to see one another; and they whisper together in the ears in corners. Into this ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of our retiring. I spoke in Italian; he replied in English, observing that he supposed the fear of contracting the malaria fever had induced us to seek the shelter of the shade: but it is too early in the season to have much reasonable fear of this insidious enemy; yet, he added, this bottle which you may have observed here at my breast, I carry about with me, as a supposed preventive of the effects of malaria, and as far as my experience, a very limited one, however, has gone, it is effectual. I ventured ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... of words are of no use, strictly speaking, to science; the philosopher, if he desires to arrive at truth rather than merely to persuade, finds them his most insidious enemies. But man is rarely engaged in pure science, in solid thinking. Generally his mental activities are bathed in a warm current of feeling and he seizes upon the feeling-tones of words as gentle aids to the desired excitation. They are naturally ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... DANTES, last evening, in the Chamber of Deputies, was one of the most dangerous diatribes to which we ever listened—dangerous for the insidious and sophistical principles it advanced, and the almost fiend-like eloquence with which they were urged. Where are these things to stop? At what terrible catastrophe do these men aim? What crisis ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... "American Lutheranism" in the West, wrote concerning the Platform: "It is the very thing we have long needed in our Church; it will require every man to declare that he is for or against us, and will secure our American Lutheran Church against the insidious efforts of the Old Lutherans to remodel her." "If the New School brethren do not soon decide whether they will give the Church the positive form which it must take in this country ere long, the Old School will decide it for them by making all their synods stand on ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 2: The United Lutheran Church (General Synod, General - Council, United Synod in the South) • Friedrich Bente
... "Charivari" takes the dignity out of an obnoxious minister. One morning, on going to the schoolroom, Master Langdon found an enlarged copy of this sketch, with its label, pinned on the door. He took it down, smiled a little, put it into his pocket, and entered the schoolroom. An insidious silence prevailed, which looked as if some plot were brewing. The boys were ripe for mischief, but afraid. They had really no fault to find with the master, except that he was dressed like a gentleman, which a certain class ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... journey, he excited no little suspicion and distrust. The very thing that lends him charm to those who love to see intellectual movement and development allowed apostles of prejudice and good, but narrow-minded, men to think of him as insidious, leading his disciples on to conclusions to which he designed to bring them, while his purpose was veiled. But, says Froude, who tells us this, and was himself at Oxford in those early days, he was on the contrary "the most transparent of men. He told us what ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... of sincere convictions, true or false in themselves as the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough to argue at all with each other, we must all be tempted at times. Such insincerity however is for the most part apt to expose itself. But there is a more insidious sophistry of which Plato is aware; and against which he contends in the Protagoras, and again still more effectively in the Phaedrus; the closing pages of which discover the essential point of that famous quarrel between the Sophists and Socrates or Plato, in regard to a ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... demonology will hear a good deal about a gruesome and insidious animal called the Water Horse. This fell beast, though able at need to transform itself into the shape of a human being, is normally like a horse, though much bulkier and fiercer. Its usual abode is in the deep lochs, but it may occasionally be seen, with wreck or sea-weed ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... very little account of that insignificant number of men of German origin who, misguided or corrupt, dare by insidious and underground processes to attempt to weaken or oppose the resolute will of the Nation. There are too few of them to count and their manoeuvres are too clumsy to be effective. But let them be warned. There is sweeping through the country ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... that Sunday morning when she kissed the borderman. What transports of sweet hope and fear were hers then! How shame had scorched her happiness! Yet still she gloried in the act. By that kiss had she awakened to a full consciousness of her love. With insidious stealth and ever-increasing power this flood had increased to full tide, and, bursting its bonds, surged over her with ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... by his creed of morbid fatalism to seek this test, whereby his fate might be sharply decided. He longed, too, for action, and the idea, once held, fascinated him. But to all others on board he seemed merely the victim of some insidious magic. That he was under a spell Helgi had ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... just where the trouble lies, Nelson, with drinking intoxicating things. People should be able to drink or not, as they feel inclined. But alcohol is insidious. Why! you teach that in your own ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... and to "keep in the ring," to live and dress beyond their means as many do, it is necessary to have an unexacting standard of morals. In this way the promiscuous libertine is evolved,—the most insidious and dangerous product of present day civilization, and the most pernicious factor in the spread of immoral ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... institutions to stand against the rudest shocks of violence, the wonderful thrift and enterprise of our people, and the demonstrated superiority of our free government, it behooves us to constantly watch for every symptom of insidious infirmity that threatens our ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... extent. They carried him very far from life as lived at Canton Magna Rectory; very far from all, indeed, in which the roots of his experience were set, thus producing an atmosphere of doubt, of haunting and insidious unrest. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... beloved boyhood. Tonight the stars haunted him. Over the ridge tops a few miles, they were shining in the window of Lucy's tiny room, perhaps lighting her fair face. It seemed that these stars were telling him all was not well in Lucy's mind and heart. He could not shake the insidious vague haunting thought, and longed for dawn, so that in the sunlight he could dispel all morbid doubts and the shadows ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... with insidious stab, Snatched from Zenobia's side her gallant lord, And threw into her hand the exigencies Of an unstable and capricious throne. Yet was her genius not inadequate. The precepts of experience, intertwined With intellectual power of lofty grade, Combined to raise Palmyra's beauteous ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... after Dunbar had gone. Was it possible that Klein, or men like Klein, old employees and faithful for years, could be reached by the insidious wickedness of Germany? It was incredible. But then the whole situation was incredible; that a peaceful and home-loving people, to all appearances, should suddenly shed the sheep skin of years of dissimulation, and appear as the wolves of ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... digressing are far more insidious than would appear at first sight. It is so easy, one finds such delightful things, it is all in the daily task of gathering knowledge, it may be useful to us some day, and so on. But, unwisely ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Robinson, from 16,000 to 20,000 pounds, if not a larger sum, was said to have been expended in carrying the day. I recollect a worthy tobacconist, who kept a little shop in the town, who had a vote and was not inclined to sell it cheap. In every insidious way was he assailed to part with his vote. On the occasion of this election the list of voters was rapidly running out to the last drop; the hour of closing the poll was approaching, and it was found impossible to keep the poll ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... towards his fellow snobs than is your regular soldier, whose trade is war. With us, your yeomen whenever they have a chance, I have observed, most uncivilly poke about the lieges with but and bayonet, or thump and rump them with their chargers, and entice the ill-broken brutes with insidious prods of the spur to swish their tails, if tails they have, into the upturned ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... you were doing all that for my best good, and I wish—I wish you could have seen how exemplary you looked when you were trying to pour a cocktail out of a corked bottle, between your remarks on passionate fiction and puffs of the insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco began to get in its deadly work, and you turned pale and reeled a little, and called for air, it made me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray instantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and cut out poor ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... "'We are insidious and shameless, Ungrateful, faint-hearted and wicked; At heart we are cold, sterile eunuchs, Traducers, ...
— The Shield • Various
... lover keeping a long deferred tryst after a period behind prison walls. His Waziri, at marrow, were more civilized than he. They cooked their meat before they ate it and they shunned many articles of food as unclean that Tarzan had eaten with gusto all his life and so insidious is the virus of hypocrisy that even the stalwart ape-man hesitated to give rein to his natural longings before them. He ate burnt flesh when he would have preferred it raw and unspoiled, and he brought down game with arrow or spear when he would far rather have leaped upon it from ambush and ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... could positively dislike, but to whom you could not talk for five minutes without having a vague sensation of blight. Things seemed to shrivel up in his presence as though they had been touched by an insidious east wind, a subtle frost, a secret chill. He never praised anything, though he sometimes condescended to approve. The faint puffs of blame in which he more generally indulged were never sharp or heavy, but were like the smoke rings of a cigarette which a man indolently smoking ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... they were fixed and content and passionless. She liked to sit in the sun, feel its warmth, see its brightness; and sometimes she almost forgot to go back to her patient. She fought at times against an insidious change—a growing older—a going backward; at other times she drifted through hours that seemed quiet and golden, in which nothing happened. And by and by when she realized that the drifting hours were gradually ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... by saluting him with the most insidious and stately compliment I could possibly offer to a Sagamore of a conquered race—a race which already was nearly extinct—investing this Mohican Sagamore with the prerogatives of his very conquerors by the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... to Goldite hurriedly and sought out his friend McCoppet. When the two were presently closeted together where their privacy was assured, a conspiracy, diabolically insidious, was about to have ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... an influence on the Edinburgh, probably somewhat modifying its whole tone, and generally identified with its reputation. "The son of a Saint," says Christopher North, "who seems himself to be something of a reviewer, is insidious as the serpent, but fangless, as the glow worm"; and the Tory press were, naturally, up in arms against the champion ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the insidious Falcon, by not making his approaches in a way to alarm her, acquired her friendship as well as her gratitude; and, in short, she got used to him and liked him. Not being bound by any limit of fact whatever, he entertained her, and took ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... 1890. Compare Folk-lore, i. (1890) p. 275. Having been honoured, like other strangers, with a place on the platform, I did not myself detect Lucifer at work among the multitude below; I merely suspected his insidious presence. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... challenged the Belgian Papal officer. There he overheard some of his comrades, just returned from an entertainment, talking of a certain Hungarian. This gentleman had been drinking pretty freely, and, whilst under the influence of the insidious Italian wines, had boasted of the superiority of his compatriots; and on being courteously contradicted he had worked himself up to the assertion that one Hungarian would be a match for three Italians. The officers, listening to this tale of brag, all laughed with the exception ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... eyes. I had learned from books to be disinterested and generous, before I was taught from experience the necessity of being prudent. I had contracted the habits and notions of a philosopher, while I was exposing myself to the insidious approaches of cunning: and often by being, even with my narrow finances, charitable to excess, I forgot the rules of justice, and placed myself in the very situation of the wretch who thanked me ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... settled at all. In your position at Hawarden, there would then be at once increased ease and increased attraction in the performance of your duties; nor can I overlook the fact that the life of the unmarried man, in this age particularly, is under peculiar and insidious temptations to selfishness, unless his celibacy arise from a very strong and definite course of self-devotion to the service of God and his ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... must show herself off. They sat down to watch her, and a more insidious feeling crept over Peter as he did so. The girl bent her body this way and that; arched herself over and looked at them between her feet; twisted herself awry and made faces at them. They laughed, but there was a new note in ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... d'Urtis. Little more was left for him to do; and that little he did. He went towards the fair shepherdesses. He tried to overcome his timidity—he overwhelmed the first sheep of the flock with his insidious caresses—and then, finding himself within a few feet of Amaranthe—he bowed, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Lucy. She was English; but, after we were married, we lived long abroad—in Italy. She liked the country, and I liked what she liked. She liked to draw, too, and I got her a master. He was an Italian. I will not give his name. We always called him 'the Master.' A treacherous insidious man this was, and, under cover of his profession, took advantage of his opportunities, and taught my wife to ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... prosperity of the grower, and but a few days later Southern Springs stood amidst bare brown fields of dry poppy heads, scarred by the cutter's knife, exuding in thick drops the poisonous juices—a striking picture in the eyes of all men of the fate awaiting the smoker, who, lulled by the insidious charm of the fascinating drug, would finally be the only one unable to see himself a ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... at first regarded him, and no longer shunned the acquaintance of which he seemed desirous. It was not until this stage that Bruce made any serious attempt to take some steps towards winning his wager. He asked De Vayne to a dessert, and took care that the wines should be of an insidious strength. But the young nobleman's abstemiousness wholly defeated and baffled him, as he rarely took more than a ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... of this animal kindred some of us, deviating towards it, become like wolves, faithless and insidious and mischievous; others like lions, wild and savage and untamed; but most of us like foxes, wretches even among brutes. For what else is a slanderous and ill-natured man than a fox, or something ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... of symptoms so frequent, so insidious, so fruitful with agony of mind and body, that we shall mention them particularly. They illustrate, at once, how all-important is close observation, and how significant to the wise physician are trifles seemingly ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... presence and breath. He fastens himself On bright, innocent youth, And slyly allures him From virtue and truth. He holds by the throat The servants who wait To hear his excuses; And sad is their fate, For insidious smile Is his only excuse To victims who suffer Defeat and abuse. So sly are his movements, So stealthy his tread, Like a vampire, on blood He is frequently fed, While his victim, unconscious, Makes no defence; He steals mind and honor And good common sense. ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... this preaching, and the obvious effects of this wholesome example, others of the company, deceived by the insidious sensation which steals upon the unsuspecting victims of such exposures, as the treacherous herald of their death,—others, in turn, required and promptly received the application of the same strange remedy. But this could not always last. The fatigue of their previously overtasked systems ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... name was mentioned, Willy thought of this incident, so very typical did it seem to him of the man, and he liked to twit his father with it. But Mr. Brookes could not be brought to see the joke, and he fell back on the plausible and insidious argument that, notwithstanding his manners, Berkins was worth eight ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... of the intense pleasure which is said to accompany it, nearly always contains elements the recognition of which would shock and distress the contemplatives themselves.[29] There are, however, other elements, of a less insidious kind, which make the ecstatic trance seem desirable. These are, according to Professor Leuba, the calming of the restless intellect by the concentration of the mind on one object; the longing for a support and comfort more perfect than ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... of this judicious class is far from exempting them from the dominion of chance, a subtle and insidious power, who will intrude upon privacy and embarrass caution. No course of life is so prescribed and limited, but that many actions must result from arbitrary election. Every one must form the general plan of his conduct by his own reflections; he must resolve whether ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... divided, it would fall an easy prey to the invaders; but they were soon undeceived. Having crossed over to the Canadian village of Sandwich on the 12th July, Brigadier-General Hull issued on that day the following insidious but able proclamation, which was doubtless written at Washington. It will be seen that the American general was made to say, that he did not ask the assistance of the Canadians, as he had no doubt of eventual success, because he ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... particularly the British, employed aeroplanes chiefly for patrolling their coasts, naval harbors and subsidiary fleet bases, as well as the principal shipping lanes, in order to keep them clear of the insidious action of hostile submarines. Of this silent and steady coast patrol work, which is deprived of any spectacular side, little has come to light, except where a reconnaissance also involved an attack upon ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... compared to the danger within the gates from the unworthy sons of the Church of England herself? I have but little hope that the propounders and framers of these innovations will desist from their insidious course; but I rely with confidence on the people of England, and I will not bate a jot of heart or life so long as the glorious principles and the immortal martyrs of the Reformation shall be held in reverence by the great mass of a nation, which look ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... increased recognition of the value of sanitary laws and of personal hygiene? No one questions the importance of the discovery of Koch; it has given Science the knowledge that a definite enemy exists, whose insidious invasion she strives to prevent, and whose ultimate conquest may one day be accomplished—more by prevention than by cure. But when a medical writer ascribes the decrease in mortality of this disease to the discovery of Koch in ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... of Evangelical literalism—a school which in after life both my brother and myself came to regard as the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of unbelief; we therefore looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and for my own part I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the cause of Christ has ever encountered. But of ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... consented to a form of government which should give to a majority of three fourths of the States the power to deprive them of their dearest rights and privileges. Yet to this extremity the new-born theory of the power of amendment would go. Against this insidious assault, this wooden horse which it is threatened to introduce into the citadel of our liberties, I have sought to warn the inheritors of our free institutions, and earnestly do invoke the resistance of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... submission; it is not the pouring-out of ourselves in weakness, but the gathering of ourselves together in increasing strength. There is no weakness in Spirit, it is all strength; and we must therefore always be watchful against the insidious approaches of the Negative which would invert the true position. The Negative always points to some external source of strength. Its formula is "I AM NOT." It always seeks to fix a gulf between us and the Infinite Sufficiency. It would always have ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... hands and took hold of his. That well-remembered sweet, subtle scent of hers rose to his nostrils. There is nothing more insidious than a scent which carries suggestions and associations. 'Frankie, you ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... rendered the success infallible. When Holmes approached the Dutch, he put on an amicable appearance, and invited the admiral Van Ness, who commanded the convoy, to come on board of him: one of his captains gave a like insidious invitation to the rear-admiral. But these officers were on their guard. They had received an intimation of the hostile intentions of the English, and had already put all the ships of war and merchantmen in an excellent posture of defence. Three times were they valiantly assailed by the English; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... on a girl-chase, he had toured with a theatrical company for a few months while his father thought he was at the hospital working. Her sponge-like eagerness for all the Romance, the Adventure he could give her was insidious in its effect on him; she was flattered that he, with all his cleverness, his "grown-up-ness" that went so queerly with his babyishness, should have so thrown himself on her mercy; to her nineteen years it seemed a wonderful and beautiful thing that a man of twenty-seven ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... disregarding her sudden flush of colour, and little timid smile of recognition, when he saw her by chance. But, after all, this could not last for ever; and, having a second time given way to tenderness, there was no relapse. The insidious enemy having thus entered his heart, in the guise of compassion to the child, soon assumed the more dangerous form of interest in the mother. He was aware of this change of feeling, despised himself for ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... It was that soft insidious hour which begins when it is time to dress for dinner and ends in horrified exclamation and a rush for the bath. Valerie, seated at the piano, was playing Massenet's Elegie, and Every was lolling in a deep chair before the fire, studying a map of the ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the soil from the mountains leaves bare ridges of sterile rock, and the rich organic mould which covered them, now swept down into the dank low grounds, promotes a luxuriance of aquatic vegetation, that breeds fever, and more insidious forms of mortal disease, by its decay, and thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man. [Footnote: Almost every narrative of travel in those countries which were the earliest seats of civilization, contains evidence of the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... were the principal interrogators, who, in this examination, of which there is printed an account not unentertaining, behaved with the boisterousness of men elated by recent authority. They are represented as asking questions sometimes vague, sometimes insidious, and writing answers different from those which they received. Prior, however, seems to have been overpowered by their turbulence; for he confesses that he signed what, if he had ever come before a legal judicature, he should have contradicted or explained away. The oath was administered ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... Portobello with all sorts of horrible presentiments. I was glad when I turned the corner and saw the blinds still up. He was definitely better, if the word definitely can be used about such a detestably insidious complaint. I have ordered Consuelo for you, and you should have it soon this week; I mean next week of course; I am thinking when you will receive this letter, not of now when I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sir Honesty with every possible decorum, till I found that the insidious rascal was making a jest of me. Not that I am quite certain I am not more truly the friend of this very respectable person than those who pretend they are always in his company; for I neither cant with Madam Morality nor pray with Dame Methodism: ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... transportation of the defenders from Ireland, appears to have created continual anxiety: a committee of officers was formed to examine persons suspected, when Harold, a priest, was arrested, and accused his fellow prisoners. His testimony was insidious, and discredited; but the alarm led to the formation of a volunteer company of a hundred persons, who armed for the suppression of rebellion. The more distrusted of the Irish prisoners were conveyed to Norfolk Island; there, some months after, ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... is in bad taste and spoils taste. The "Tannhauser" March seems to me to savour of the Philistine; the overture to the "Flying Dutchman" is much ado about nothing; the prelude to "Lohengrin" was the first, only too insidious, only too successful example of how one can hypnotise with music (—I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... had grown overwhelming, and he suddenly thought of Mrs. Heeny's clippings. His mother, alarmed by an insidious gain in weight, had brought the masseuse back from New York with her, and Mrs. Heeny, with her old black bag and waterproof, was established in one of the grand bedrooms lined with mirrors. She had been loud in her joy at seeing her little ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... strong defensive preparations and his almost clairvoyant foresight, in Hamilton Burton an insidious change was taking place and the brain which so astutely cooerdinated many things was totally unconscious of its own transitions. Egotism had made him. A self-faith which took no account of difficulties, had carried him to the apex of his ambitions. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... on the effort of sectarians to divide the school fund, as an insidious attempt to lay the axe at the root of our noble public school system, the benefits of which are every day manifested in the training ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... hostile and definite stand against the German idea (which includes, by the way, the permanent subjection of woman) I should have been a traitor, for I knew out of the menace I had felt to my own future, as bound up with an assured development under insidious influences, what the future of my country, which stands for the only true progress in the world today, and a far higher ideal of mortal happiness than the most benevolent paternalism can bestow, had in store for it, with Germany victorious, and America (always profoundly moved ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... still more by his almost constant attendance on his fascinating companion. As the particular friend of the Dacre family, and as the secret ally of Mrs. Dallington Vere, he in some manner contrived always to be at Miss Dacre's side. With the laughing but insidious pretence that he was now almost too grave and staid a personage for such scenes, he conversed with few others, and humourously maintaining that his 'dancing days were over,' danced with none but her. Even when her attention was engaged by a third ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... their philosophical writings. This procedure is grounded in the common fallacy of supposing that infinity and quantity are compatible attributes, and susceptible of mathematical synthesis. This insidious and plausible error is ably refuted by a writer in the "North American Review."[219] We can not do better than transfer his argument to our pages in ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... man have done for the education of a young girl? How many of the qualities he understood and enjoyed in women could he desire to see developed in his daughter? There was yet enough of the father in him to expect those qualities in her to which in other women he had been an insidious foe; but had he not done what in him lay to destroy his right of ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Slavens' defense, although she knew that the charge was calumnious. But it furnished her a sudden and new train of thought. What interest had the chief of police in circulating such a report? Was the motive for Dr. Slavens' disappearance behind that insidious attempt to discredit him, and fasten a character upon him wholly ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... to the monarchic and aristocratic constitution of the State arises from the insidious advance of the French revolutionary dogma of equality. The spirit of envy is undermining the social hierarchy in every country. That mean spirit of democratic envy is as old as the democratic institution itself. Ostracism ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Charnock almost forgot his pain in his fury. The fellow was a dangerous reptile, and could not be allowed to hurt Sadie by his poisonous tricks. Charnock meant to punish him, but must first overcome the insidious ally the other had counted on. He looked at his watch again. A quarter of an hour had gone; he felt stronger, and more confident. For all that, the fight was stern, and at length Festing, entering quietly, was surprised to find Charnock sitting with his watch in his hand. His brows were knit; ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... whole view of the subject, your committee are decidedly of opinion, that lotteries are the most injurious kind of taxation, and the very worst species of Gambling. By their insidious and fascinating influence on the public mind, their baleful effect is extended, and their mischievous consequences are most felt by the indigent and ignorant, who are seduced, deceived, and cheated out of their money, when their ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... every summer a more insidious foe approached. Some little party of tourists, including a lady, who sketched in water and never finished anything, would hear of the old church, and wander up to it. But Mr. Raby's trusty groom was sure to be after them, with orders ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... vexed and tortured me was a demon of my own soliciting—of my own creation. But, I knew not this. I congratulated myself on escaping from him. Blind fancy!—I little knew the insidious pertinacity of this demon—this demon of the blind heart. I little knew the nature of his existence, and how much he drew his nutriment from the recesses of my own nature. He could spare, or seem to spare, the victim of whom he was ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... of the disease is extremely insidious, a slow but increasing condition of weakness being complained of by the patient. There is a feeble and irregular action of the heart resulting in attacks of syncope which may prove fatal. Blood pressure is extremely low. From time to time there ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was as nothing to the mental anguish which he suffered. Death was before him if he lay there—death in a painless, insidious form, no doubt; but still, death in all its horror to one so ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... it to be an upcrop of that primitive Evil which legend has embodied in the person of Lucifer. Has it occurred to you that the insidious process of corruption which you have followed step by step through the art, the music, the literature, the religion and the sociology of Germany may have been directed by someone? If you are the mouthpiece ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... with the impressions furnished by the parliamentary sketch in his daily paper the next morning. The difference will be little less than miraculous. Yet the bored observer of the previous night will find in the printed article no discrepancies, no insidious departures from sober fact; and as he reads it, the conviction will grow upon him that his own impressions were wrong, and that after all a debate in the House of Commons is a remarkably amusing and ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... or more appropriately than temperance. I know not how she can resist or turn aside from the duty of acting in this; its effects fall so crushingly upon her and those whose interests are identical with her own; she has so often seen its slow, insidious, but not the less surely fatal advances, gaining upon its victim; she has seen the intellect which was her dearest pride, debased; the affections which were her life-giving springs of action, estranged; the children ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Jarvis soberly. "In a way, you're right. The dream-beast! That's the best name for it—and it's the most fiendish, terrifying creation one could imagine! More dangerous than a lion, more insidious than a snake!" ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... the slow torture of these days and weeks, the first insidious doubts, the increasing fears, that seemed to be corroborated day by day? Yes, it was not my fancy; Etta was right; he was certainly changed; ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the sweetly pensive mein Is the soft gentle Nature seen, And chaste reserve, and modest fear, And artless innocence appear—- There—-the little fly coquet Aiming her insidious glances: For trapping hearts each feature set, From the canvass makes advances, 240 Nay—-if we credit the delusive face, She seems just springing ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... examination, of which there is printed an account not unentertaining, behaved with the boisterousness of men elated by recent authority. They are represented as asking questions sometimes vague, sometimes insidious, and writing answers different from those which they received. Prior, however, seems to have been overpowered by their turbulence; for he confesses that he signed what, if he had ever come before a legal judicature, he should have ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... mysterious processes, complicated rites and terrifying ceremonies; and thirdly, the crowd of nobles and plebeians who flocked to the doors of the sorcerers and filled their pockets in return for magic potions, philtres, and, in certain cases, insidious poisons. Thus La Voisin must be placed in the second category; "in spite of her luxury, her profits, and her fame," she "is only a subaltern agent in this vast organization of criminals. She depends entirely for her great enterprises on the intellectual chiefs ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... bizarre, almost unbelievable. Phil Abingdon had experienced in her own person the insidious power of Ormuz Khan. She now found herself under the spell of a personality at least as forceful, although in a totally different way. She found herself running through a winding path amid bushes, piloted by this ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... fears of the good people of these States, so as to create divisions among them, and a defection from the common cause, now by the blessing of Divine Providence drawing near to a favourable issue. That they are the sequel of that insidious plan, which from the days of the Stamp-act down to the present time, hath involved this country in contention and bloodshed. And that, as in other cases so in this, although circumstances may force them at times to recede from the unjustifiable claims, there can be no ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... the Government to protect the integrity of the elections of its own officials is inherent and has been recognized and affirmed by repeated declarations of the Supreme Court. There is no enemy of free government more dangerous and none so insidious as the corruption of the electorate. No one defends or excuses corruption, and it would seem to follow that none would oppose vigorous measures to eradicate it. I recommend the enactment of a law directed against bribery and corruption ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... which had shown as wisdom a couple of hours ago, showed now as selfishness and pusillanimity. If she wanted him, he was there joyfully to do her bidding, at whatever cost to himself in subsequent unrest of mind seemed but a small thing. If heartache and insidious provocations of the flesh came later, let them come. He was strong enough to bear the one and crush out the other, he hoped. It would give him something to do—he told himself, a little bitterly—and he ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the abundant 'sweetness' of the book cannot make beautiful this monstrous perversion of reason, this insidious attack on the very distinction ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... straightforward, honest Yankees was complete and embarrassing. And by way of keeping it within the bounds of political orthodoxy, they were informed that the Germans had conspired to hoodwink them by selling at undercost prices, in order to turn them against the French. It was an insidious form of German propaganda! ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... treated; many joined to discuss these who otherwise would hold their tongues. One small knot had no better occupation than to worm out of me my name; and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed I grew to baffle them. They assailed me with artful questions and insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I was perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward laughter. I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for the secret. He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... relaxed. A man must be very careful, as Mr. Gladstone once incisively observed, to prevent his religion from damaging his morality. The simpleminded people with whom this sharp-witted and fresh-spirited young Englishwoman met had not fortified themselves against that insidious peril. One woman told a lie and the offense was sheeted home to her. 'Ah, well,' she replied, in a nonchalant and easy way, 'I do not feel that I have grieved the Spirit much!' George Eliot was horrified. ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... within the past five years, agricultural colleges have been prevented from adding advisers on cooperative organization to their extension staffs, retail merchants' associations have prevented cooperative organization legislation, and insidious attempts have been made to prevent popular education ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... of autumn came on apace, and by-and-by the Manor was deserted. The Bruce-Errington establishment removed again to town, where business, connected with his intending membership for Parliament, occupied Sir Philip from morning till night. The old insidious feeling of depression returned and hovered over Thelma's mind like a black bird of ill omen, and though she did her best to shake it off she could not succeed. People began to notice her deepening seriousness and the wistful melancholy ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... royal order. Of these new members some six or seven were leading persons of Bunyan's congregation. But, with all his ardent desire for religious liberty, Bunyan was too keen-witted not to see through James's policy, and too honest to give it any direct insidious support. "In vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird." He clearly saw that it was not for any love of the Dissenters that they were so suddenly delivered from their persecutions, and placed on a kind of equality with the Church. The king's object was ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... The ravages of the insidious disease with which she was afflicted soon came to an end; and after a term of wedlock as brief as it was prosperous, Mrs. Edgeworth's dying couch was spread.—"I have every blessing," she wrote, "and I am happy. The conversation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... was praised as possessing a subtle and mysterious talent very different indeed from the hesitating smile of La Jaconde. There is a picture of the Holy Family by him in the Louvre, and of it Harding wrote—"This canvas exhales for us the most delicious emanations, sorrowful bewitchments, insidious sacrileges, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... was it known that watch and ward was closely kept from beneath those dark tents, that to the eyes within had the air of couching beasts of prey. Yes, couching to devour what could not fail to be theirs, in spite of the mighty walls of rock and impregnable keep, for those deadly and insidious foes, hunger and thirst, were within, gaining the battle for the Saracens without, who had merely to wait in patience ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... girls of the bush are natural, jolly, unconventional, but not loose. So far and no farther is their attitude to mankind. And they've got an independence of character which knocks you fellows sick when you meet them. They don't want any of these insidious palavers and hollow attentions, and they'll tell a man pretty quick what they think. My word! can't ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... democracy than anarchy is snobbery. The former is violent, while the latter is insidious. Both poison the source of the stream of democracy. If the home instills into the minds of children the notion of inherent superiority, they will carry this into the school and it will produce a discord. A farmer ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... mother. She had two able generals, Aetius and Boniface, whose discord was fatal in its effects. At the same time in the East, the government was managed by Pulcheria for her brother, Theodosius II., who had succeeded Arcadias in 408. Aetius, who was a Hun, by insidious arts persuaded Placidia to recall Boniface, who was governor of Africa, at the same time that he advised Boniface to disobey the order which he represented as a sentence of death. Boniface sent to Gonderic, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... own heart Ferris cared not a whit whether Clayton had been waylaid by accidental thugs, betrayed at the bank, duped by some insidious woman, or slain by an inner conspiracy ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... bigot, a fanatic, a temperament governed by jealous fears and by the morbid revengefulness of the man of feeble physique. It was Robespierre who always stood for the worst side of terrorism, for all that was most insidious and deep seated in it; and after its failure and the reaction in the summer of 1794, it was his name that was deservedly associated with ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... inevitable outcome of the play of the sexual impulse. No doubt it may often become morbid, and is never a healthy process when indulged in to excess, as it is liable to be by refined young people with artistic impulses, to whom it is in the highest degree seductive and insidious.[230] As we have seen, however, day-dreaming is far from always colored by sexual emotion; yet it is a significant indication of its really sexual origin that, as I have been informed by persons ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the house? Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... may fancy him as visited by compunctions and mortifications due to his consciousness of his own futility. Or you may fall back upon the simple and general promptings that are smoothly current in the minds of us all. My own notion, however, is this: he never would have married at home; only an insidious whiff of romance, encountered in France or Italy, ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... "It is an insidious counsel to violence, revolution, Bolshevism and utter anarchy to say to people that they should disregard any law formed by all ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... just once upon a hideous burrow, dank and haired with grass; Fixed upon me eyes perfidious As a fiend's are, yet insidious— Questioned if I dared to pass. "I will search all Hell To find ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... have related to you as one acquainted with ancient history. It follows that all should lay aside, as unworthy of him, the love of plunder, which has often been the insidious bane of the Roman soldier, and that every one should keep steadily to his own troop and his own standard, when the necessity for fighting arises, knowing that should he loiter anywhere he will be hamstrung and left to his ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... that the artificially induced ecstasy, which is desired on account of the intense pleasure which is said to accompany it, nearly always contains elements the recognition of which would shock and distress the contemplatives themselves.[29] There are, however, other elements, of a less insidious kind, which make the ecstatic trance seem desirable. These are, according to Professor Leuba, the calming of the restless intellect by the concentration of the mind on one object; the longing for a support and comfort more perfect than man can give; and, thirdly, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... in those days. While I believe that some men will be drunkards in spite of almost everything that can be done for their relief, others there are, no matter how surrounded, who never will be drunkards, but solely because they abstain from ever tasting the insidious poison. Temperament has much to do with the matter of drink, and could it be known and properly guarded against, I believe that a majority of those having the strongest predisposition to drink, if steps were taken ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... of these high power rays, as well as of inorganic minerals, is very slow and insidious, manifesting only in the course of many years. This new field of therapeutics, therefore, has not yet passed ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... paragraphs in Gibbon's History. He ought either, with manly courage, to have denied the moral reformation introduced by Christianity, or fairly to have investigated all its motives; not to have confined himself to an insidious and sarcastic description of the less pure and generous elements of the Christian character as it appeared ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... could think of merely as such, regarding them as blank negative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence might make life difficult but could not confuse the ideal of life. No one sought to understand these enemies of his, nor even to conciliate them, unless under compulsion or out of insidious policy, to convert them against their will; he merely pelted them with blind refutations and clumsy blows. Every one sincerely felt that the right was entirely on his side, a proof that such intelligence ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Braddock had impressed itself on all the army, and inspired a caution that was but too much needed; since, except Washington's men and a few others among the provincials, the whole, from general to drummer-boy, were total strangers to that insidious warfare of the forest in which their enemies, red and white, had no rival. Instead of marching, like Braddock, at one stretch for Fort Duquesne, burdened with a long and cumbrous baggage-train, it was the plan of Forbes to push on by slow ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know, what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry, for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House. Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss! Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations, which cover our waters and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... enigma to us like him who is broadly our antipodes in moral being, and whether ours is the good or the bad nature does not affect the saying. His feelings the while were strangely diverse. The election of the evil genius to the first place in the insidious movement was well done for the Academy; there would be no failure with him in control; ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... organs. When a healthy brain is transmitted to children, and their treatment from infancy is judicious and rational, its health becomes so firmly established that, in after life, its power of endurance will be greatly increased, and it will be enabled most effectually to ward off the insidious attacks of disease. On the other hand, where this organ has either inherited deficiencies and imperfections, or where they have been subsequently induced by early mismanagement, it becomes peculiarly susceptible, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... invariably act with the strictest honour towards those who never attempt to impose upon them. It is natural for a deceitful person to take advantage of the credulity of others. The genuine Indian never utters a falsehood, and never employs flattery (that powerful weapon in the hands of the insidious), in his communications with ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... I said. I tried to make my voice indifferent, for I was on guard against insidious friendliness. I had bludgeoned my mind into an attitude of safe hostility towards her, and I saw the old chaos ahead if I allowed myself ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... eloquence, and a courage equal to any undertaking, that quailed before no opposition and suffered no abatement in defeat, and they only marvelled the more that a statesman of the first rank should accept at the hands of an insidious rival a fifth-rate mission—insidious rival not named but easy to identify. The fact that Mr. Gladstone had hired a house at Corfu was the foundation of a transcendent story that Mr. Disraeli wished to make him the king of the Ionian ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Protestants, are warned by a great missionary that we must not be deluded by these insidious compliments; we must not forget that the work of the Jesuits in China "overtops all other forms of superstition and error in danger, and stands forth an organised conspiracy against the liberties of mankind. The schemes of the ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... of the younger "spenders" irritated the group of nerves appropriated by his class-consciousness almost beyond endurance; but he managed to stand it by reminding himself that irritation of all such was a healthy sign and vastly preferable to insidious tolerance. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... and most intelligent of women, and by whom I beg of thee to let thy own life be regulated. Allow not thyself to be led away by pleasures; shun, like the plague, the foolish familiarities thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice. Credit me, the greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour. I beseech and direct that ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... diminution in their number. The great enemy they have to contend with is fire, and modern conveniences and luxuries, electric lighting and the heating apparatus, have added considerably to their danger. The old floors and beams are unaccustomed to these insidious wires that have a habit of fusing, hence we often read in the newspapers: "DISASTROUS FIRE—HISTORIC MANSION ENTIRELY DESTROYED." Too often not only is the house destroyed, but most of its valuable contents is ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... lake—ah, you don't remember, but I—Shall I ever forget it!—the first day my heart went out to him I tried to call it back, to laugh at my weakness, to call myself a fool! And I thought I had succeeded in driving the insidious feeling away. But I was wrong. It was there in my heart already, and day by day, as I saw him, as I heard him speak, the thing grew until I could not see him cross the lawn, hear him speak to the dog, without thrilling, without shivering, shuddering! Father, have pity ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Dutchman, for, in good truth, not only he and his kindred, but all the people of the colony, were most unjustly blamed and unfairly treated by the Government of that day. Nevertheless Conrad was wrong about the Union Jack. The wisest of plans are open to the insidious entrance of error. The fairest flag may be stained, by unworthy bearers, with occasional prostitution. A Secretary of State is not the British nation, nor is he even, at all times, a true representative of British feeling. Many a deed of folly, and sometimes ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... are an insidious poison, sapping the vitality of our civilization, blighting woman ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... I feel, as swift, Insidious ravager, I saw thee fly Through fair Lucina's breast of whitest snow, Preparing swift her passage to the sky. Though still intelligence beam'd in the glance, The liquid lustre of her fine blue eye; Yet ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... to fight the Black-Horse Cavalry, as the gang of "strike" legislators was called. One of the most insidious bills pushed by these rascals aimed at reducing the fares on the New York Elevated Railway from ten cents to five cents. It seemed so plausible! So entirely in the interest of the poor man! Indeed, the affairs of the Elevated took up much of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... In the short compass of one page the Marquess of Argyle is designated as "the diabolical Scotch Cromwell," "the vile vindictive persecutor," "the base traitor," and "the Argyle impostor." In another page he is "the insidious Campbell, fertile in villany," "the avaricious slave," "the coward of Argyle" and "the Scotch traitor." In the next page he is "the base and vindictive enemy of the House of Maclean" "the hypocritical Covenanter," "the incorrigible traitor," "the cowardly and malignant ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... made an effort to hold his theory together. He approached the bunk, and with an insidious craft sought to draw the old man out. But Clenk was now on his guard. His comrades had bitterly upbraided him with his self-betrayal, that indeed threatened the safety of all. In fact, their courage ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the Plains Indians are few, and in large part of modern origin, belonging properly to the so-called "transition period." That period must be held to begin with the first insidious effect upon their manners and customs of contact with the dominant race, and many of the tribes were so influenced long before they ceased ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... of the whole people is colored by what they read. Whenever the editorials of reputable papers work toward a specific goal, they usually achieve it. Have we not had a striking example of that during the present war? The insidious power of propaganda is incalculable. Fortunately our national papers are high-minded and patriotic and have directed their influence on the side of the good, quieting fear, promoting loyalty, encouraging honesty, and strengthening the nobler impulses that ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... desolating warfare of a fell savage foe—it is that the midnight and sleeping couch of our infants may not be awakened to death by the tremendous yell of an Indian warwhoop —it is that the gray hairs of our fathers may not become the bloody trophies of a cruel and insidious foe. Cruelty and a thirst for blood are the inmates of an Indian's bosom, and in the neighborhood of two contending powers they are never peaceful. If the strong hand of power does not bend them down they will raise the tomahawk and bare the scalping ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... kindred some of us, deviating towards it, become like wolves, faithless and insidious and mischievous; others like lions, wild and savage and untamed; but most of us like foxes, wretches even among brutes. For what else is a slanderous and ill-natured man than a fox, or something ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... it can only be dealt with in detail; it must be nibbled into here and there; discredited piecemeal; subjected to the ravages of the white ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians lend themselves to this insidious kind of examination, because what was worst in the pretentiousness of their age is to be found enshrined in the Standard Biographies (in two volumes, post octavo) under which most of them are buried. Mr. Strachey has some criticism ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... with people whose every word, as likely as not, may be an insidious falsehood. Thinking over what she had heard from Dymes, Alma was inclined to believe him; on the other hand, she knew it to be quite possible that he sought her with some interested motive. The wise thing, she knew, would be to disregard ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... glad to think I had not said it when tea came up, and saved a dangerous situation by breaking an insidious spell. ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... if the momentary trance—this fugitive beguilement of my wo—had been conceded by a demon's subtle malice only with the purpose of barbing the pang, by thus forcing it into a stronger relief through the insidious peace preceding it. It is a well known and most familiar experience to all the sons and daughters of affliction, that under no circumstances is the piercing, lancinating torment of a recent calamity felt so keenly as in the first moments of awaking in the morning from ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... unguent to clear out auld rannell-trees and our beds o' the English bugs as they ca' them, than we wad gie a plack to rid the land of the swarm of Arminian caterpillars, Socinian pismires, and deistical Miss Katies, that have ascended out of the bottomless pit, to plague this perverse, insidious, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that it would be his portion not to fall manfully in the thick of the combat and the press of battle, but to die poisoned in the tent of Chryseis. For who could foresee a tragedy so needless, so blind, so brutal in its lack of dignity, or know that such strength could perish through such insidious weakness, that so great a man could be stung to death by a mania born ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... The silent and insidious increase of their obligations, by reason of the enhanced and steadily enhancing value of gold, has ruined many thousands of business men who are even now unconscious of the real cause or of the power that has ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... order to dash onward to another. This is rather hard upon the health, because it requires the deglutition of innumerable potions. I have always maintained that tea is an admirable entity if it be considered merely as a time of day, but that it is insidious if it be considered as a beverage. At Chautauqua, tea is not only an hour but a drink; and (though I am a sympathetic soul) I can only say that those who like it like it. For my part, I preferred the concoction sold at rustic soda-fountains, ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... time met Tyler Rountree, villain. I moved on to New York. A gray-haired magnate Went mad about me—so another fortune. He died one night right in my arms, you know. (I saw his purple face for years thereafter. ) There was almost a scandal. I moved on, This time to Paris. I was now a woman, Insidious, subtle, versed in the world and rich. My sweet apartment near the Champs Elysees Became a center for all sorts of people, Musicians, poets, dandies, artists, nobles, Where we spoke French and German, Italian, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... throwing out crumbs to the workers long proved successful. But it was supplemented by other methods. To draw the labor leaders away from a hostile stand to the established political parties, and to prevent the massing of workers in a party of their own, the politicians began an insidious system of bribing these leaders to turn traitors. This was done by either appointing them to some minor political office or by giving them money. In many instances, the labor unions in the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... tortured eyes the slender drooping figure move slowly upward, battling with himself, praying for strength to let her go—for he knew that if she even turned her head his self-control would shatter. It was weakening now and the sweat broke out in heavy drops on his forehead as he strove to crush an insidious inward voice that bade him forget the past and take what was his. "Only one life," it seemed to shout in mocking derision, "live while you can, take what you can! What is done, is done; only the present matters. Of what use is regret, of ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... from all temptation. If leaning, perchance, over the side of the vessel, and looking down on the troubled water, my mind grows troubled also with agitated thoughts, I start from the insidious posture. I find something to tug—to haul. A rope is thrown to me, and I am saved! Or I seize the rudder—I grasp its handle, grown smooth by its frequent intercourse with the human palm—and, believe me, there is a magic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... the duties of the bishopric he saw a means of asceticism—a kind of courageous purification. He would load himself of his own will with so many anxieties and so much work that he would have no time left to listen to the insidious voice of his "old friends." Could he manage to silence them at once? This unheard-of grace—would it be granted to him? Or would not rather the struggle continue in the depths of his conscience? What comes out as certain is that those ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... defence; may discompose our minds with vexatious passions; may, by false reports, odious suggestions, and slanderous defamations, blast our credit, raise a storm of general hatred, and conjure up thousands of enemies against us; may, by insidious practices, supplant and undermine us, prejudice our welfare, endanger our estate, and involve us in a ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... there is something precious, to be guarded as a chief treasure in the instinct of nationality, as I assume, there are grave dangers in too much friendly commercial "infiltration" from the outside. The indirect influences of commercial exploitation with foreign capital are the insidious, the dangerous ones. The dislike of the foreign trader, the foreign creditor, may voice itself crudely as mere envy, know-nothingism, but it has a healthy root in national self-preservation. For an Italian ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... reformers. Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the age. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... children fair; Of wolves' insidious arts beware; And, as you pass each lonely wood, Ah! think of small red ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... brought into port to rent. If she will not submit to be fastened to the dock, stripped of her rigging, and scrutinized by unwashed artificers, she may spring a leak when riding most proudly on the subject wave. Norway fir nor English oak can resist forever the insidious assaults of the seemingly conquered ocean. The man who clears the barnacles from the keel is more essential than he who hoists the ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... regular soldier, whose trade is war. With us, your yeomen whenever they have a chance, I have observed, most uncivilly poke about the lieges with but and bayonet, or thump and rump them with their chargers, and entice the ill-broken brutes with insidious prods of the spur to swish their tails, if tails they have, into the upturned phizes ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... treason, with insidious stab, Snatched from Zenobia's side her gallant lord, And threw into her hand the exigencies Of an unstable and capricious throne. Yet was her genius not inadequate. The precepts of experience, intertwined With intellectual power of lofty grade, Combined to raise Palmyra's ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... simultaneous insurrection. A double mystery of villany saved us, probably, at that time from the shocks and horrors of war in which we have been recently involved. The deposed Kurruck Singh suddenly expired—a victim, it was whispered, to the insidious efficacy of slow and deadly poison, intermingled, as his son knew, in small quantities every day with his food. The lightning-flash of retribution descended. On the return from the funeral of Kurruck, the elephant which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... times the invincible belief in the reality of existence would come back, insidious and inspiring. He squared his shoulders, held himself straight, and walked with a firmer step. He felt a glow within him and the quickened beat of his heart. Then he calculated in silent excitement ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... into rebellion, under the insidious advice of the French king's agents, advanced and took the town of Tongres, killed some few people, and made prisoner there the bishop of Liege and the lord of Humbercourt. The fugitives who brought this news to Peronne made the matter even worse than this, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... him. Unfortunately, just as he started, news was brought him at the railway station that his second daughter, whose brilliant gifts and happy marriage seemed to promise everything for her future, had been stricken by the beginnings of an insidious and, as he too truly feared, hopeless disease. Nothing could have more retarded his own recovery. It was a bitter grief, referred to only in his most intimate letters, and, indeed, for a time kept secret even from the other members of the family. Nothing ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... chiefly in the form of spirits, is often given to procure sleep and to relieve pain, such as that of neuralgia, dyspepsia, colic and diarrhoea. It is as a sedative that alcohol is so insidious and seductive in cases of chronic disease, as, if frequently resorted to, the drink craving is almost certainly developed. Hence the importance in many cases of rather bearing the ills we have than of ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... it was necessarily more sincere. We do not think so much of that sincerity which affronted the fear of persecution; because, after all, the searching persecutions were rare and intermitting, and not, perhaps, in any case, so fiery as they have been represented. We think more of that gentle but insidious persecution which lay in the solicitations of besieging friends, and more still of the continual temptations which haunted the irresolute Christian in the fascinations of the public amusements. The theatre, the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... no high form of thought or action, and to the everlasting credit of the French people be it said, they not only resented it, but stood loyally by their Emperor and their country until they were overpowered by the insidious poison of treason and ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... only the first means that occurred to him of getting another advance; and that advance—L500 on account—he did actually get. But if it was the suggestion of the publisher, Griffin must have been a bold man. A writer whose acquaintance with animated nature was such as to allow him to make the "insidious tiger" a denizen of the backwoods of Canada,[2] was not a very safe authority. But perhaps Griffin had consulted Johnson before making this bargain; and we know that Johnson, though continually remarking on Goldsmith's extraordinary ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... in one town working at full time, and those of an adjacent town shut out, must be explained as one of the insidious methods of the Trust to ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... been so insidious and successful, however," my informant concluded, "that even his own soldiers were convinced that he had sold out to Austria and when the King attempted to rally them as they were falling back from the positions on Mount Lovtchen they jeered in his face, shouting that he had betrayed ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... preferr'd, admired, caress'd, They first invade your table, then your breast; Explore your secrets with insidious art, Watch the weak hour, and ransack all the heart; Then soon your ill-placed confidence repay, Commence your lords, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... at the Cabin at this early hour of the morning, nor would Beth be able to see him until late this afternoon—perhaps not until to-night. Meanwhile, the note upon the mantel was burning its way into her consciousness. It was endued with a personality feminine, insidious and persuasive. No ladies of London affecting heliotrope envelopes had any business writing scented notes to Peter now. He was ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... the burden of naval preparation. When an English society proposed in 1895 that Canada should contribute money to a central navy and share in its control, Sir Charles Tupper attacked the suggestion as 'an insidious, mischievous, and senseless proposal.' He urged that, if Canada were independent, 'England, instead of being able to reduce her army by a man or her navy by a ship, would be compelled to increase both, ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... with foam. Our boat had a "drooping nose," and was extremely partial to what the men termed "drinking;" in other words, it shipped a good deal of water over the bows. Now it happened that while we were straining our eyes ahead, to catch a sight of our haven, an insidious squall was creeping fast down behind us. The first intimation we had of its presence was a loud and ominous hiss, which made us turn our heads round rather smartly; but it was too late—for with a howl, that appeared to be quite vicious the wind burst upon our sails, and buried ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... of enteric fever, though the attack usually runs a mild course. The sugar temporarily disappears during the fever. But the most serious complication of all is known as diabetic coma, which is very commonly the final cause of death. The onset is often insidious, but may be indicated by loss of appetite, a rapid fall in the quantity of both urine and sugar, and by either constipation or diarrhoea. More rarely there is most acute abdominal pain. At first the condition is rather that of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... was mentioned, Willy thought of this incident, so very typical did it seem to him of the man, and he liked to twit his father with it. But Mr. Brookes could not be brought to see the joke, and he fell back on the plausible and insidious argument that, notwithstanding his manners, Berkins was ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... only impressed with this threat, went off at once to obey the insidious tiger, who of course was ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... sacrifice to Heaven would be offered, and he determined to wait and see whether the 1 費. 2 郈. 3 成. 4 In connexion with these events, the 'Narratives of the School' and Sze-ma Ch'ien mention the summary punishment inflicted by Confucius on an able but unscrupulous and insidious officer the Shaou chang, Maou (少正卯). His judgment and death occupy a conspicuous place in the legendary accounts. But the Analects, Tsze-sze, Mencius, and Tso Ch'iu-ming are all silent about it, and Chiang Yung rightly rejects it as one of the many narratives invented to exalt the ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... It might seem insidious if I were to praise his ode entitled Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, as an effusion of high poetical enthusiasm, and strong political feeling. His Sonnet to Schiller conveys a fine compliment to the author of the Robbers, and an equally fine idea of the state of youthful enthusiasm ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... a flight. It was clear he loved her, as she loved him; what then were a few words five years old, to keep them apart? She tried honestly to arm her breast by thinking of the laws that separated them; but the insidious part of it was, they were worldly laws; and here the world was thrust out of sight. Why did he not take her in his arms, and let her heavy head fall on his shoulder? her heart reiterated; and that was the only voice she could hear then. Yet if Garth had betrayed ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... the house, it is hydrogen and not water gas which will form its basis. With carbureted water gas and 20 per cent. of carbon monoxide we are still below the limit of danger, but a pure water gas with over 40 per cent. of the same insidious element of danger will never be tolerated in our households. Already a patent has been taken by Messrs. Crookes and Ricarde-Seaver for purifying water gas from carbon monoxide, and converting it mainly into hydrogen by passing it at a high temperature through a mixture of lime ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 • Various
... it. If a man can carry his neighbours with him, he may say what he likes; but if not, what insult can be more gratuitous than the telling them what they do not want to know? A man should remember that intellectual over-indulgence is one of the most insidious and disgraceful forms that excess can take. Granted that every one should exceed more or less, inasmuch as absolutely perfect sanity would drive any man mad the moment he reached it, but . ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... thought how, in all likelihood, the details of his defeat could not be suppressed in the clubs and cafes. This anticipated publicity he took in ill part, fanning his mental disorder with brandy, mellow and insidious with age. But beneath the dregs of indulgence lay an image which preyed upon his mind more than his defeat beneath the Oaks: a figure, on the crude stage of a country tavern; in the manor window, with an aureole around her from the sinking sun; in the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... printed in italics, for it is the essence of patriotism. The "fuss and tumult" in America were due, for the time being, to the apple of discord which Douglas had cast into the Senate, by his Kansas-Nebraska bill. Hawthorne was too far away to distinguish the full force and insidious character of that measure, but if he had been in Concord, we believe he would have recognized (as so many did who never had before) the imminent danger to the Union, from the repeated concessions to the slave power. After he had become disenthralled from his allegiance to party, we find him ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the unknown, the unexperienced, is a more haunting, insidious fear than any other, and sometimes one positively longs to hasten the advent of an unwelcome ordeal, in order that the worst may be known and the menace of the future be transformed into a memory ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... in particular, was singularly wise and dignified-looking, with an aspect which was either bland or severe, one could scarcely say which. Another resembled strikingly the typical diplomatist of romance, having a manner suave and infinitely deferential, but oh! so under-handed and insidious and diabolical! The duc de Broglie was the French ambassador in London at the time of my visit, and of all the corps his person and countenance possessed much the most distinction. His was a distinction of spirit and intellect: the distinction of the other ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... showed signs of attack: scallops cut out, holes bored, stains of fungi, wreaths of moss, and the insidious mazes of leaf-miners. But, like an old-fashioned ship of the line which wins to port with the remnants of shot-ridden sails, the plant had paid toll bravely, although unable to defend itself or protect its tissues; and if I did not now destroy it, which I should assuredly not do, this weed ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... a correct judgment, as he feared he might be seduced by the excellence of our execution. Besides these, Liszt's Symphonic Poems were played on two grand pianos. At the feast, a dispute arose about Heinrich Heine, with respect to whom Liszt made all sorts of insidious remarks. Frau Wesendonck responded by asking if he did not think Heine's name as a poet would, nevertheless, be inscribed in ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... in the glow of Papal sunshine, to figure in Allocutions from the Vatican as "the pure and shining light of the house, the glory of her husband, the education of her family, a bond of peace, an emblem of piety;" and to let Monsieur Duruy and his insidious Professors alone. ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... situation was at once novel, unprecedented, and in more senses than one, alarming. Without its due and timely solution there was danger of still farther disturbance of a far different and more alarming character than that of arms but lately ceased; and of a vastly more insidious and dangerous complexion. The war had been fought in the open. The record of the more than two thousand field and naval engagements that had marked its progress and the march of the Union armies to success, ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... cursed by Heaven's decree, 385 How ill exchanged are things like these for thee! How do thy potions, with insidious joy, Diffuse their pleasure only to destroy! Kingdoms by thee, to sickly greatness grown, Boast of a florid vigor not their own. 390 At every draught more large and large they grow, A bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe; Till sapped their strength, and ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... so ill, he was obliged to quit his work, and for a month I did not see him, though only a short square separated us. He was slowly yielding to an insidious disease, some said; and I had to bear the pain of this uncertainty, as well as the secret agony of my own crushed ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... the Council of State took place on Monday, the 10th of May. A communication was made to them, not merely of the Senate's consultation, but also of the First Consul's adroit and insidious reply. The Council regarded the first merely as a notification, and proceeded to consider on what question the people should be consulted. Not satisfied with granting to the First Consul ten years of prerogative, the Council thought it best to strike the iron while it was hot, and not to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... His style seems to have been constructed entirely for their tastes; his topics are admirably selected, and his mode of communicating excellent lessons of enterprise, truth, and self-reliance might be called insidious and ensnaring if these words did not convey an idea which is only applicable to lessons of an opposite character and tendency taught in the same attractive style. The popularity of this book, "Self-Help," abroad has made it a powerful instrument of good, ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... born in a tent in 1162, son of a petty Mongolian chieftain, succeeded his father when only thirteen years old. Many of the tribes immediately rebelled, but Temuchin held his own in battle and in counsel against open enemies and insidious traitors, until his empire extended from the China Sea to the frontier of Poland—an empire larger than modern Russia, the largest the world ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... new ways of satisfying the lust of liberty and overstimulated desire. The poor are growing poorer, and to "keep in the ring," to live and dress beyond their means as many do, it is necessary to have an unexacting standard of morals. In this way the promiscuous libertine is evolved,—the most insidious and dangerous product of present day civilization, and the most pernicious factor in the spread of immoral impulses ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... was her custom she glided, a glorified young creature, in and out amongst the shrubbery, until the envious chapel door hid her from my sight. No living thing was in view. The sound of no discordant voice broke the holy peace of God. Temptation came never to our first erring mother in more insidious guise than this. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... not a word during our drive home, and I, leaning back, shut my eyes and lived the evening over again. Eugen's friend had laughed the insidious whisper to scorn. I could not deal so summarily with it; nor could I drive the words of it out of my head. They set themselves to the tune of the waltz, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... a hurried glance over her shoulder. Alas, they had not calculated on the insidious levels of the terraced plain, and the faithful Pedro had suddenly disappeared; the intervention of six inches of rising wild oats had wiped him out of the prospect and their possible salvation ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... the remaining typhoid must be in the direction of the improvement of milk supplies, precautions against secondary infection, and attention to a large number of details surrounding the individual, which may effectively protect him against the insidious attack of the disease favored by ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... efforts they make to do right. Doubtless there is a danger to be guarded against. To adopt the practice of noticing and commending what is right, and paying no attention whatever to what is wrong, would be a great perversion of this counsel. There is a danger more insidious than this, but still very serious and real, of fostering a feeling of vanity and self-conceit by constant and inconsiderate praise. These things must be guarded against; and to secure the good aimed at, and at the same ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... presence of Dominie Sampson, from whom, in his own juridical style of wit, he contrived to extract great amusement both for himself and one or two friends whom the Colonel regaled on the same occasion. The grave and laconic simplicity of Sampson's answers to the insidious questions of the barrister placed the bonhomie of his character in a more luminous point of view than Mannering had yet seen it. Upon the same occasion he drew forth a strange quantity of miscellaneous and abstruse, though, generally speaking, useless learning. The lawyer afterwards compared his ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
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